Motherboard shipments tanked in 2022

[Shawn Knight]

Bottom line: The world's top four motherboard makers collectively saw shipments decline by more than 10 million units in 2022, in line with broader industry trends. Unfortunately, a serious turnaround might not happen until late this year or in early 2024.

Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock were among the hardest hit. According to supply chain sources, ASRock saw shipments dip by 55 percent year over year, from around six million units in 2021 to just 2.7 million last year. MSI, meanwhile, shipped 9.5 million boards in 2021 but managed to send out just 5.5 million in 2022, a decline of more than 42 percent.

Asus fared a bit better, from 18 million boards shipped in 2021 to 13.6 million last year (about a 25 percent drop), while Gigabyte realized a 14 percent drop from 11 million units shipped to around 9.5 million.

The "usual suspects" were to blame for the mobo shipment slump including ongoing economic troubles, the move away from cryptocurrency mining and workers returning to offices.

The component report is in line with others we have been hearing about in recent weeks and months regarding the overall health of the PC market. Just last week, Mercury Research said the fourth quarter of 2022 played host to the biggest dip in PC processor shipments in three decades and mirrored a similar result from earlier in the year.

Mercury ultimately concluded that 2022 represented the largest slump ever in the PC CPU industry, with only 374 million CPUs shipped for the full year. That is 21 percent fewer than were shipped in 2021 and notably does not include Arm processors.

Speaking of, Counterpoint Research believes Arm CPUs are poised to capture a significant share of the laptop market. By 2027, one in four laptops sold are forecast to be powered by an Arm chip instead of a traditional x86 processor.

Looking ahead, the hardware market is expected to remain flat before recovery starts near the tail end of 2023 or in 2024.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97604-motherboard-shipments-tanked-2022.html

 

[McMurdeR]

Increased costs and prices will do that!

I'm not trying to be facetious, but bouyed by COVID era sales, the PC industry seems to be going out of its way to push high cost products to the market in the hopes that the party would continue. $1000+ GPUs. $300+ motherboards for AM5? Why was all the mid range stuff delayed? Why is it all overpriced and underwhelming?

 

[psycros]

The technology plateaued right at the start of COVID and the industry gouged like mad. Reap what you sow, boys.

 

[Lionvibez]

Not really surprising alot of people bought or did upgrades at the start of covid that gravy train was only going to last so long. And boards being over prices doesn't help, not touching anything AM5 until prices drops.

 

[Nobina]

Yesterday: GPU shipments tanked
Today: Motherboard shipments tanked
Tomorrow: RAM shipments tanked

 

[Skjorn]

Well the boards people used to like to buy now all cost as much or more than the CPU they would normally pair them with.

My last upgrade was Z590 OCF and 11700K. Together cost me less than $400 new at microcenter. I think the Z97 Hero was like $220 when I bought it new now they want over $600 for the Z790 Hero.
I personally think they've gotten much worse than GPUs for what they offer.

 

[madboyv1]

Waiting out the market to tank and lower even a little bit is hard when you want to tinker and build something new for yourself for the first time in 7 years... but also screw these awful prices.

I make sure to sanctify my PC with my incense and sacred oils, murmuring my hymns and mantras to the Machine God and my war rig's Machine Spirit, that and the dust that lines my components is what keeps things together and running.

 

[takaozo]

Damn, the motherboard I got 6 months ago a MSI B550-A PRO for $110 is now selling with $190, a 70% increase.
Same AM4 CPU and DDR4 RAM are down like 30-40%.
And they wonder why sales are low......

 

[p51d007]

Let em tank. I'm still running an i5 on the home pc because I ain't paying what they have been charging.
Go down some more & I'll upgrade.

 

[Julnor]

Waiting out the market to tank and lower even a little bit is hard when you want to tinker and build something new for yourself for the first time in 7 years... but also screw these awful prices.

I make sure to sanctify my PC with my incense and sacred oils, murmuring my hymns and mantras to the Machine God and my war rig's Machine Spirit, that and the dust that lines my components is what keeps things together and running.

I have an old 6700k build and an even older 2500k build. Truth is both still run great for my purposes. The 2500k shows a bit of age at times but it's perfectly serviceable. There is nothing I do right now on the 6700k that it doesn't handle excellently though. I'm still skeptical for gaming that there is a big difference with newer CPUs, especially for older games which are almost all single core speed limited, and won't utilize newer instruction sets anyway. Bigger cache might help them, but in that case a 5800X3D build is still more cost effective because of DDR5 and 600 series motherboard costs, as well as the fact the 7x3D aren't even out yet.

GPU prices have been insane and that is the bigger drag right now. My PCs are running a GTX 1060 and an RX 6600, at 1080p and 1440p respectively. But the biggest difference my testing has shown is in fact adaptive sync/freesync. Freesync is a game changer. Not sure why that isn't being mentioned. If you don't have a freesync monitor or SSDs those are the things you can tinker with and see a big gain.

If Starfield is really good and requires more hardware power I'll have tougher decisions to make. The truth is I can actually spend the money for top of the line hardware even at these stupid prices, I just really do not want to do so. I spend more money donating to food banks and other charities regularly anyway, it's a simple matter of just diverting that money directly to hardware, I wouldn't even feel a difference financially. But it still disgusts me, these hardware prices are stupid and I dislike the people that defend it and even attack others that don't want to pay these dumb costs. But ultimately at some point it's for our enjoyment and as years keep dragging on, it's either give up essentially the one thing I spend on myself or give in and pay. And I'll have to make that decision in the next couple of years. I think I might just grab a PS5 though instead.

 

[wiyosaya]

This reminds me of the Charlie Brown cartoons where Charlie was sitting in class and all Charlie was able to hear from the teacher was "Blah, Blah, blah ba-blah."

As I see it, it is so typical of business execs that have no f'ing clue about the real-world is that they blame everything else but the main driver, Motherboard prices are way too high and the market is not willing to pay those prices, especially when previous, or much earlier, generation technology is still doing fine with what most people run.

As I see it, the same could be said, in some sense, about industry execs that thought streaming was a fad and they needed to jump on the bandwagon, there, too, because "there is so much profit to be made in this streaming fad; people will pay anything for our content." Those execs also had/have no f'ing clue that people were tired of paying astronomical prices for subscription TV, I.e., cable/satellite, and now with the plethora of streaming services, subscribing to them all, in terms of price, is back into the astronomical region where people do not want to pay that much for them.

Typical brain-dead business execs - profit is all that matters. They should call themselves Ferengi.

 

[madboyv1]

-snip-

Same. I have a 6700K+GTX1080 (the computer mentioned and covered in oil and incense), an old 2500K+GTX570 that's mothballed, and an ooooold Q8400 PC in a 2U rackmount chassis doing all sorts of weird things in my house. I'm honestly surprised that last one is still going strong, but don't ask it to open two chrome browsers at once ha ha.

Running triple 1080p screens though does strain my GTX 1080 sometimes, especially if I decide to use it that way in gaming. It's only a matter of time (and sooner before later) until my GTX 1080 can't keep up. Generally my CPU also keeps up, but I feel it chug from time to time too.

 

[BrwPCnrd87]

I've purchased 4 motherboards in the last 12 months for various builds, all of them used and they have all worked well for my needs and saved e-waste and money. I completely scrapped the AM5 build I was planning after the AM5, 40 Series and 7000 Series launches and just upgraded my current AM4 platform. Even that, I almost didn't do.

 

[toooooot]

Possible reasons: new am5 boards are hella xpensive, intel's current socket nearing the end.
Should be all.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

They seem to have forgotten that prices for everything else have gone up leaving less for pc parts.

 

[R00sT3R]

Sales collapsing so lets put prices up!

Yep, that'll work.

Somebody, somewhere needs to tell these tech companies that Pandemic Economics was the exception, not the norm that they seem to think they can cling to.