Rant: Why do gamers buy expensive motherboards?

[UltraMega]

1 hour ago, Fluxmaven said:

It was Skylake (6th gen) and it was 2133 on B150. B250 moved the needle to 2400. B360 was 2666. B460 gave us 2666 for i5 and below and 2933 for i7 and above. 

 

During that entire time, Ryzen was here with higher core counts and support for faster memory. Early Ryzen's had a hard time running RAM higher than 3000, but at least it wasn't locked away. 

I didn't realize they locked ram to even lower speeds on the even cheaper chipsets. Such a lame thing to do. 

 

Intel 6th gen was 2015, ryzen wasn't until 2017. I'd guess 2017 is when Intel stopped locking down ram speeds. 

[Andrew]

You don't really have a choice anymore.

 

Back in 2013 when I bought a Crosshair V, I bought it because I wanted to do some overclocking beyond what cheap motherboards could handle. I paid £180 (£243 adjusted for inflation) new for it and it was pretty high end at the time/

 

These days, if you want four RAM slots and two m.2 slots, you pretty much have to go high end because the cheaper motherboards that are perfectly fine for gamers in theory, only have two RAM slots and maybe one m.2 slot. A mid-range motherboard these days is around £180-£220. The closest equivalent to a modern Crosshair V has a RRP of £385 and it's selling for £300.

[Fluxmaven]

29 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

I didn't realize they locked ram to even lower speeds on the even cheaper chipsets. Such a lame thing to do. 

 

Intel 6th gen was 2015, ryzen wasn't until 2017. I'd guess 2017 is when Intel stopped locking down ram speeds. 

We are just splitting hairs at this point, but Kaby lake desktop CPUs launched in 2017 which would have been B250 which were still locked down. They didn't stop until B560 which was Rocket Lake (11th gen).

[UltraMega]

1 hour ago, Andrew said:

You don't really have a choice anymore.

 

Back in 2013 when I bought a Crosshair V, I bought it because I wanted to do some overclocking beyond what cheap motherboards could handle. I paid £180 (£243 adjusted for inflation) new for it and it was pretty high end at the time/

 

These days, if you want four RAM slots and two m.2 slots, you pretty much have to go high end because the cheaper motherboards that are perfectly fine for gamers in theory, only have two RAM slots and maybe one m.2 slot. A mid-range motherboard these days is around £180-£220. The closest equivalent to a modern Crosshair V has a RRP of £385 and it's selling for £300.

True that 4 ram slots and multiple m.2 slots make a board more costly to a degree that seems out of touch with the actual difference in the board, but it's also true that the need for extra ram slots is not as high as it used to be. Been a long time since I used more than 2 sticks. And more m.2 slots can be added via a cheap pcie card. My board has 2 m.2 slots and it wasn't very expensive. 

Edited June 18 by UltraMega

[Sir Beregond]

6 hours ago, UltraMega said:

True that 4 ram slots and multiple m.2 slots make a board more costly to a degree that seems out of touch with the actual difference in the board, but it's also true that the need for extra ram slots is not as high as it used to be. Been a long time since I used more than 2 sticks. And more m.2 slots can be added via a cheap pcie card. My board has 2 m.2 slots and it wasn't very expensive. 

Anymore, anyone who wants to do high speed DDR5 overclocking with tweaking specifically wants 2 DIMM boards which as far as I know only exist at the enthusiast high end tier of motherboards.