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PC gaming has always been an expensive hobby, but prices have become downright ridiculous as of late. It’s bad enough that Nvidia’s RTX 50-series cards cost slightly less than an international flight, but the memory supply crisis is also driving up the price of RAM and SSDs. Now it looks like motherboards might be next to see a significant price spike.
Board Channels is a forum for hardware manufacturers and partners to communicate. One poster recently wrote, “The price of upstream raw materials for motherboards has indeed risen significantly.” They go on to say that the price of motherboard PCBs alone has increased by between 15% and 50%. Wi-Fi modules are said to have gone up between 10% and 20%, while capacitor prices have also gone up approximately 50% (via Videocardz).
As we’ve reported before, these price increases are likely caused by material shortages resulting from the Strait of Hormuz crisis and the ongoing Iran war. For instance, PPE resin can be thought of as the glue that binds the many layers of a PCB together, and a huge chunk of the world’s high-quality PPE comes from petrochemical company Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) in Saudi Arabia. Not only does this company rely on the Strait of Hormuz to ship exports out, but Reuters reports SABIC’s Jubail plant was attacked back in April.
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The Board Channels source writes, “The rise in raw material prices for components has at least a 10% impact on the cost of motherboards.” Therefore, the prices consumers see will likely have to increase to keep pace—though we’ve yet to see the peak.
“Looking at the price increases from major motherboard manufacturers in August, the overall increases were relatively small, only around 3%, and affecting a limited number of models,” the source continues, “Among Taiwanese brands, MSI raised prices across the board, while Asus and Gigabyte only increased prices for their main models, with small increases ranging from 5-50 yuan. Domestic brands [in China] like Colorful and Maxsun only increased prices by 10-20 yuan, resulting in a relatively small overall increase.”
For context, five yuan is about $0.74. 10 yuan is $1.49, and 50 yuan is still only about $7.44 at time of writing. But the source goes on to say, “There is still room for motherboard costs to rise, and it is possible that motherboard manufacturers will continue to raise prices for certain models in the coming months.”
In other words, as with so much of hardware pricing right now, it’s likely going to get worse before it gets better. Same old story, eh?
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