Title says it pretty much, I’m not new to building PC’s and stuff like that, but I was browsing parts today and was wondering why motherboards, a pretty large piece of tech that’s responsible for a lot of different tasks, are usually so much more cheap than the GPU or CPU even RAM sometimes, a much smaller part. Just curious, thanks for any info.
In: Technology
Motherboards contain mostly relatively small integrated circuits that are fairly generic, both of which makes them cheap. There are also some passive components (capacitors, resistors, connectors, etc.) that are very cheap. The PCB itself is a bit complex but the technologies used to make them is also fairly inexpensive, and there’s a huge amount of competition.
Microprocessors and GPUs are large integrated circuits and can only be provided by a couple of companies, and both of these factors makes them expensive. In addition to being large chips, they tend to be manufactured using the most advanced technologies available, which of course is also very expensive. A waferfab can cost in excess of $10B to build these days, and that doesn’t count the millions of dollars needed to make masks and the high prices of materials, manpower and maintenance.
Motherboards come out more or less all useable. When creating CPUs, a number don’t pass benchmark tests.
i3, i5 and i7 are all the same CPU. When they test the chips after being made, most will flunk the i7 tests, some will flunk the i5 tests, and a number will even flunk the i3 test. They manually handicap the processors so that they are limited to the next lower performance class.
The reason the i7s are so expensive is because not many of them come out of a batch.
Motherboards are the stuff that connects everything else. They don’t *do* a lot compared to the other parts and are not nearly as complex/requiring as many tiny or complex components. Sure, they’re *wide*, but so is a sheet of paper compared to an iPhone.
The research and development that go into gpu’s and CPU’s is much more than motherboards. The manufacturing process for making A GPU and CPU is also much more expensive. Motherboards are relatively simple circuits consisting of easy to buy basic electronics where CPU’s and GPUs contain thousands of tiny transistors (an electronic component) that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Hopefully this helps.
Latest Answers