Friday, June 7th 2019
MSI CEO: AMD Plans to Stop Being the Value Alternative, X570 Motherboards to be Expensive
MSI's CEO Charles Chiang, quoted by Tom's Hardware at COMPUTEX 2019, laid out what we were already seeing with motherboard designs from all vendors of AMD's X570-based motherboards: pricing is likely increasing across the board, and AMD's market positioning won't be of the alternative, lower-value brand.
As quoted, Chiang said that ""Lots of people ask me, what do you think about today's AMD? I say today's AMD is completely different company compared to two, three, five years ago. They have nice technology and they are there to put the higher spec with the reasonable pricing. But right now they say, "Hey Charles, let's push to marketing to the higher [end]. So let's sell higher-pricing motherboards, higher-spec motherboards, and let's see what will happen in the market. So I don't think that AMD is the company that wants to sell low cost here, low cost there." Which does make sense: AMD isn't in the position of the underdog anymore -at least technology and product-portfolio wise when it comes to consumer CPUs. With better products, comes a desire for higher margins, and a change in direction for a company that was basically forced to almost cut itself out of the market in terms of profits with its previous, non-competitive CPU designs.
Efforts to survive on AMD's part have been immense, with the company severely tightening its belt in all fields, including R&D, in the times leading to the launch of their previous-gen architecture, Bulldozer. And with the way that one architecture panned out in the market, AMD didn't really find a way to dig itself out of the trenches. No like it has with Zen: a lithe, small, highly efficient design that allowed the company to not only make up lost ground on technology and CPU performance but also on profits. That the company wants to price its products in higher segments, alongside their performance improvements and competitiveness against Intel's slow-moving lineup, makes all sorts of sense from a business perspective.
Charles Chiang said that there a multitude of factors contributing to the higher pricing of X570 motherboards: that AMD is planning to charge more for each chipset (compared to the ASMedia-designed X470), but also because of the integration of PCIe 4.0. PCIe 4.0 support has meant a higher-TDp chipset (which has required a throwback to the days of old with active cooling over AMD's chipset, which has increased its TDp up to 10 W compared to the previous gen's X470's 3 W); and because PCIe switches are another best entirely in terms of complexity and power delivery capabilities. All of these add cost, and this cost will end up being passed on to end users (at least partially): as it always is.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
As quoted, Chiang said that ""Lots of people ask me, what do you think about today's AMD? I say today's AMD is completely different company compared to two, three, five years ago. They have nice technology and they are there to put the higher spec with the reasonable pricing. But right now they say, "Hey Charles, let's push to marketing to the higher [end]. So let's sell higher-pricing motherboards, higher-spec motherboards, and let's see what will happen in the market. So I don't think that AMD is the company that wants to sell low cost here, low cost there." Which does make sense: AMD isn't in the position of the underdog anymore -at least technology and product-portfolio wise when it comes to consumer CPUs. With better products, comes a desire for higher margins, and a change in direction for a company that was basically forced to almost cut itself out of the market in terms of profits with its previous, non-competitive CPU designs.
151 Comments on MSI CEO: AMD Plans to Stop Being the Value Alternative, X570 Motherboards to be Expensive
z390 has a plethora of premium high end boards but at the same time you can get z390 gaming x with a 10 phase vrm and keep the costs reasonable.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets
"AMD's addition of PCIe 4.0 support for its platform, and whipping up the PCIe 4.0 Radeon RX5700 and fostering the NVMe SSD ecosystem, are powerful value-adds. As the first PCIe 4.0 platform, Ryzen does offer something you can't get anywhere else -- access to leading platform I/O performance. That does come at the cost of higher power consumption; we're told the chipset sucks down 11-15W compared to the previous-gen's 3.5W with PCIe 3.0. That requires the active cooling via fans that we've seen on motherboards here at the show, but we're sure that many enthusiasts won't mind the return of chipset fans if they get leading throughput in exchange. "
www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-third-gen-ryzen-7nm-launch-intel-cpu,39449.html
TDP table
x570 = 11w
x470 = 4.8w
x370 = 6.8w
b450 = 4.8w
b350 = 6.8w
Here is hoping, some motherboard manufacturer releases a heatsink only like 1366 used to.
Here's where it came from:No sources, no further explanations, and so far not a single other source to support this claim.
If you google "AMD x570 11W", you'll be quick to notice that the first two pages are tech sites monkey-quoting each other with this number, without any tangible sources or validation.
Under normal load/bursting to secondary storage it should be a lot less - put the storage you need to be fast on the CPU lanes.
If you need more than 1 x fast drive and some "extra or larger or cheaper", it might be time to go to Threadripper or you won't be worried about a few watts from the chipset.
Does anyone actually have a power/heat to small fan RPM table? If the heatsink is well designed and the fan only needs to spin up to e.g. 600 rpm, it may not even be heard - assuming a good implementation.
Remarkable amd board
Also, saving on the motherboard, money wise can be put on to buy a 3900x($499) instead of a 3700x($329). That is $170 usd difference. Better to spend on a better processor that will give you 33% more multithread performance and likely 4% in single thread than to spend that on a motherboard that will give you 1% in overclocking.
Its a real trend... ;)
As if there was not a way to hehe, 1366 x58 is a good example of that.
My expectation for example for ASUS Formula is that it would be priced similar to or even higher than Intel version of ASUS Formula board.
2) Also as Buildzoid mentioned there is a point of diminishing returns in VRM quality . You can't add 40 phases and expect 4 times better results than a 10 phase that won't happen ! Most quality B450/X470 should OC 8cores and probably 12cores as good as any high end X570 , only 16cores will probably favor X570 and even there it depends .
Don't get me wrong those are very very nice mobos but they will certainly come at a very high price aswell wich for most users and usecases won't make alot of sense !
:roll: