It feels like the bottom felt out of the market and now if you want a computer that works as expected you need to get these ultra high end luxury RGB brainrot products.
Anytime I try to buy something in the mid range now it basically comes broken or falls apart in the first month of ownership.
You may as well buy Chinese ewaste from Ali express at that point.
What price range are you buying at? I have basically never had this experience.
Rant:
I built a PC for a friend of mine recently and got a bundle CPU motherboard and GPU (5600x3D microcenter exclusive at the time). I had so many problems with the Phantom Gaming 6600xt at the time. The machine would boot inconsistently. I went back to microcenter and returned the card after reading that the sapphire 6750xt didn't have the same problems and swapped up to a sapphire.
This week I just bought a Radeon 7800 XT steel legend for 480$ USD. It was smaller and cheaper than comparable products. The card has the worst coil whine I ever heard and performed poorly. I assume I paid the price for not going for something like the sapphire nitro+. I went and swapped it out (at microcenter). 7800xt nitro+ is a much better card, does not whine and works as expected.
This may be related to the AMD/Radeon products...
I have a 3080ti from MSI that is a huge RGB glowing monstrosity in one rig and a dell 3090 24G in another. I got them used for 350$ and $600 respectively. I'm running the 3080 with a 12600k and the 3090 with a 7900x with higher end motherboards (Asus Maximus and ASRock Tai chi) and have no issues. I paid extra for these motherboards to ensure that I didn't run into any weird compatibility issues.
I just keep getting burned on ASrock, MSI, gigabyte models of things in the lower tier price category. It makes me feel like "the medium soda 40 cents cheaper than the large because it exists only to make the large seem like a better deal."
“the medium soda 40 cents cheaper than the large because it exists only to make the large seem like a better deal.”
"Fly first class if you can, third class if you must, but never fly second class".
Only if you're buying brand new bleeding edge. They always launch the expensive stuff first, it's the early adopter tax. Then after initial demand is sated, they'll release the mid tier and entry level products for the price conscious buyers.
Remember when a halfway decent motherboard from a reputable make was $100? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Chinese ewaste is actually better, speaking from experience
My strategy for buying boards was always to start from the cheapest ones, and go up, until it satisfies my needs in IO and features. I genuinely don’t get why some people buy the top-end part, with a 4090, just to play league of legends, and never use a single feature they laid for
What are people doing with these super expensive boards now? Like, I know there's always the "top 1% first-person-shooter" niche that wants that last sub-millisecond of latency, playing games that don't really respond to 3D cache, but... what else? That's not a big niche. Modern CPUs have like no overclocking headroom, and even at stock are pushed way too hard.
I'd only spend that kind of money on an embedded Strix Halo board, or HEDT with tons of PCIe lanes. I just don't see why you'd shell out for Arrow Lake like that when you can get 95% of the performance for a fraction of the price and power usage elsewhere.
I don't get why people who aren't already running Ryzen 9s, i9s or 4090s are buying anything besides the cheapest option. On my last 3 builds I always sorted by price and picket the cheapest option for the CPU Socket, payed at most 70$ and never had any issues. If you need to get the last 5% of performance by overclocking I get it, but for anyone else this is a giant waste of money.
Motherboards are all about I/O and connectivity.
Personally, I do the exact same thing (I'm still Running an MSI B350M with a 5900X) but I can understand people that pay a couple hundred bucks to have extra ports / slots or built in wifi or whatever ....
$1000 for a motherboard tho ... that's ridiculous. What could possibly be worth 1000$?
Depends on what kind of games you play. Economic strategy games (tycoons, city-builders, large scale simulation games) can easily bring even a modern CPU to it's knees.
yeah but a expensive mainboard does next to nothing to improve the performance. If you already got the best SKU on offer and want to overclock then yes but otherwise its nonsense.
The motherboard doesn't matter AMD's 3D cache CPUs, which are king for these kinds of games. From what I've seen, you'd be crazy not to get either a 5700X3D or a 7800X3D with a cheap mobo.
Do people still trust ASUS enough to give them over a grand for a mainboard? I know I don't.
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