There has been a lot of discourse about the cost of Z690 motherboards, so we decided to ask around to find out what has changed compared to the previous generation of Intel motherboards. There are obviously several factors that have come together to create something like the perfect storm, as the simple answer is that all parts combined have resulted in more expensive motherboards, but there are a few key components that are major contributing factors.

A lot of speculation has been about the cost of the PCB itself and although it's correct that the PCB is a contributing factor, we're talking about a couple of dollars in extra cost, not only for the higher quality PCB materials themselves but also the fact that boards with DDR5 memory are more costly to produce, as more care needs to be taken with the overall design. However, the big surprise to us is that the single part that has driven up the cost the most is the physical LGA-17xx CPU socket and retention mechanism, which is apparently around four times as expensive as the LGA-12xx socket.Although we don't have a precise cost of either socket, an LGA-115x socket costs around US$5 in comparatively small volumes and as motherboard makers are buying far greater volumes of sockets, they are likely to pay less per unit. Even so, it seems like LGA-17xx sockets should be somewhere around US$10-15, even in large volumes. This makes the CPU socket the second most expensive component on most Z690 motherboards after the chipset, which has a list price of US$51, which is $1 more than the Z590 chipset.

Another contributing factor is the power design, as Intel moved from IMVP8 to IMVP9.1, which meant a move from DrMOS (Driver MosFet) to SPS (Smart Power Stage) modules. This design change has led to the use of not only more expensive power designs, but these parts are also in short supply, which means that each power phase is about twice the price on a Z690 motherboard compared to a Z590 motherboard. On the plus side, they should be more efficient and have lower thermals than a DrMOS type design and prices are likely to come down over time. However, as we're seeing boards with more power stages than in the past, this is as far as we can tell, the second most costly design change of the Z690 motherboards. It's also not possible to use an IMVP8 power design for a Z690 motherboard, so there's no way of saving any cost here, except using fewer power phases.

On high-end motherboards that have two PCIe 5.0 slots, a PCIe 5.0 retimer is also needed. Unfortunately we were unable to find the pricing of PCIe 5.0 retimers, but an eight lane PCIe 4.0 retimer costs around US$45 on fairly low quantities, so an estimated guess is that the motherboard makers are paying as much as US$20-30 each for them in greater quantities. However, this isn't a concern for most Z690 motherboards, as it's not required for a single PCIe 5.0 slot.

As far as the physical PCIe 5.0 SMT slots are concerned, the cost difference is 10 to 20 percent, which means a few cents per connector, in the kind of quantities that the motherboard makers purchase. A requirement here is that the board makers need to have the right kind of SMD/SMT and pick and place machines to be able to mount the PCIe 5.0 SMT slots, since older through hole slots were added by hand at the motherboard factories. As such, it's likely that some of the cost of investing in new machines are likely to spill over to the cost of each motherboard, until the machines are paid off.

None of the above takes into consideration the current situation in the world, where there's a shortage or a price hike of just about every conceivable part that goes into making a motherboard. This includes everything from the cost of aluminium to resistors and capacitors. One thing of note here is that most motherboard makers used to place their component orders three to four months ahead of production, something that is no longer possible when many, if not most components have a 52 week lead time. As such, they have had to make big changes to how they place orders and this too is likely to lead to further increases in costs. We're also hearing whispers of potential price increases coming early next year for some parts, so if you haven't gotten the motherboard you were looking to buy yet, now might be as good a time as ever to do so.