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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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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.