AMD Ryzen 7000 sales are not as good as expected. The cause ? He seems to be in the high price of X670 motherboards for this family of desktop processors. This is a barrier to adoption, since it is mandatory to acquire one in order to use one. Has Lisa Su’s business become as expensive or more expensive than its rival, and why?
Since you can’t use a processor without the motherboard, one of the pitfalls of Intel and AMD is to price competitively on processors and then get your money back on the motherboard. Well, at the moment the sales of the Ryzen 7000 are not as good as expected, because Lisa Su’s company has been causing the need to change the motherboard for years, which makes many users of the brand hesitate to change and opt for the Ryzen 5000.
AMD has a price problem with its motherboards
The historic three-letter company has had the problem of being seen for ye ars as a cheaper alternative to Intel, leading to a damaging vicious cycle. A lower price means less collection and especially if your market share is lower. Ultimately, you find that in a world of ever-increasing costs, you cannot compete under this policy. So it’s completely normal AMD is not only looking to have processors on par with its rival, but also to match it in price.
However, mounting a PC with a Ryzen 7000 as the processor it becomes an economic problem for many users. Especially for those who carry on with the old fashioned mentality that AMD means yes or yes it has to be cheap, disregarding the fact that the costs of designing and manufacturing a new CPU are no longer that that they were. Hence the paradigm shift in terms of price, not only to compete with Intel, but also to survive.
Which led to higher than expected prices for motherboards with AM5 chipsets, especially those using the X670 Extreme chipsetwhere you can see a price disparity that is not normal and in some cases like this the motherboard might be more expensive than some CPUs like the Ryzen 7700X.
What’s really going on?
Well, neither more nor less than the usual cost of adopting a new platform, let’s not forget that the AM5 chipset not only serves to be able to use the Ryzen 7000 processors, but also brings technologies such as the use of PCI Express 5.0 in all areas, DDR5 and USB4 on our PC. All of this is not possible in AM4 due to the technical limitations of the previous generation socket and these are technologies that are the next step in performance.
And yes, we know it’s a no-brainer, but one of the reasons new products are expensive isn’t just to capitalize on early buyers, those most eager to have the new thing. But also be able to clean up the stock of the previous generation. When a new generation of processors comes out, it is sometimes good to bet on the previous one, in particular because of the drop in price in the transfer time.
Either way, you don’t need an AMD motherboard with an X670 chipset to be able to build a PC around the new AMD chips. You can do this without problems with B650 motherboards and have a totally competitive computer in terms of performance and save a few hundred dollars along the way.