It would be easy to blame rising motherboard prices for the ongoing global chip shortage, but with Intel’s latest Z690 motherboards, there’s reason to think a bigger problem is causing the price hikes.
TechPowerUp’s article points out that there are a lot of features that have to go into these new motherboards compared to previous generations, such as PCIe 5.0, DDR5 and the new LGA 1700 socket.
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First of all, one of the biggest differences between LGA 1700, which we get in the Z690 chipset, compared to the previous socket, LGA 1200, is the number of pins. In the LGA 1700 socket we have 1700 small pins inside the socket, while we got 1200 in the LGA 1200, which was occupied by the Z590 chipset. Logically, more pins means more material and therefore more money needed to produce.
The question is, how much more money can another 500 little pins be? The answer is not concrete, but according to TechPowerUp, it is about four times more expensive than LGA 1200.
Funny enough, the price difference between the Z590 and Z690 chipsets is only $1.
While the new SSDs aren’t ready for dispersion, PCIe 5.0 is ready on the Z690 chipset, which adds about a 10% to 20% price increase over PCIe 4.0. That big price increase is due to what parts are needed to implement PCIe 5.0.
Higher-end Z690 motherboards, like the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero, use DDR5 RAM, which has a completely different operating procedure that needs to be brought into play during design.
We also can’t ignore the overall design of the CPUs that go into these motherboards, which are Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake CPUs. Alder Lake uses many different features than what we are used to, such as dedicated performance cores.
All the new features of the Z690 chipset case are unique and we have yet to see AMD include those features. Unfortunately, this is just another sign of the times where PC hardware has become more expensive and out of reach for gamers who want it.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn