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Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Motherboards were already way too goddamn expensive, anyway.
About a year ago I was considering upgrading my AM4 PC to AM5. The rock-bottom cheapest motherboards were only slightly cheaper than the relatively high-end one I got 5-ish years ago. I decided to stick with my current PC.
There's going to be a lot of us running 2019-vintage PCs indefinitely.
My Ryzen 5 3600 and 5700XT will outlive me.
Just repasted both of mine with phase change materials and thermal putty, including GPU dies. Looking at getting better/more fans and a smarter hub soon. Gonna make this 5800X3D last as long as possible; I'm in this for the long haul lol
Yeah I'm going to be running AM4, DDR4, with my 5800x for many more years the way it's looking.
Still using my 3700x, and there's still decent upgradeability with AM4 thankfully. But this thing is still very cromulent.
I think motherboards have been pretty aptly priced. What do you think a complex piece of a computer like that should cost? The most important part of your computer that ties every single part together?
150USD? You can get a decent board for that.
Under 100? First of all, that’s insane, and second of all, you can get a budget board for under 100.
350 is too much? You’re looking at a high end board. You’re paying high end board prices.
Is your complaint that 500 is too much for a mobo? Why are you even looking at 500 dollar mobos?
All of my boards I’ve gotten in the last five builds have been 200-300 and those are amazing machines that are either newer and excellent or older and still hold up over a decade later.
On the first computer I ever built with parts bought with my own money (around 2006 or 2007) I chose one of the best mainboards available at the time (ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe lol).
It cost about 160€ back then. That is about 250€ in todays money. There was a slightly more expensive "crosshair" version of this board, but really nothing more expensive than that.
The last mainboard I bought was "low-end" one that cost about 200€ (around two years ago).
Back then (~2006) you could get a "okay" mainboard for 50€ (~90€ today).
To me all but the lowest-end stuff seems a lot more expensive today.
For my first PC I bought an Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS, which was the second-best GPU at the time. The GTX model cost around 500€ (~770€ today) if I remember correctly.
My first self-bought computer cost me about 1300€ and was pretty close to top of the line.
Your experience is pretty similar to mine! I went with two 7900GT in SLI for my first machine tho—an 8800GTS would have been a better pick. That mobo cost me around 240 and it was fairly high end.
High end nowadays consists of a lot more stuff, though, and prices have not largely increased. Consider the difference between the 8800 series when it came out to the cost of a 3090/4090/5090! When my store got the 8800 series in we all laughed, that was way too much for a video card, nobody’s gonna spend over 600 dollars on a single video card! … D:
For motherboards though, I’d say 180-300 today covers pretty much all mid/high end boards, save for a few outliers. I’d be curious to know what an average user would get out of a board that costs more than 350.