16 of ~130 isn't plenty by any means. There are more thand double that number on Z790.
Irrelevant. Even if there are 200 boards, there are still 16 to choose from. Plenty for someone who has such specific need for more SATA ports. If they don't like any of those and don't wish to play with AICs and adapters, they can always buy any of Intel boards that offer what they need. No brainer.
Hardly anyone in the world ever maxes out on all available ports. Again, it had been said many times that it has never been as easy to add any adapter or AIC for more connectivity for those who need it. No reason to be hot-headed about this. There is no case here to win or lose one's head over 1-2 SATA ports. A non-topic.
RAID? I have about 44TB in six drives, most of them filled. I would have to pay >600€ to replace the old drives
Nowadays, such large arrays are often offloaded to NAS. I have one with 24 TB on two disks. Smaller storage is often portable too. Plus cloud. There are so many storage options that 1-2 SATA ports less on some motherboards is completely insignificant. Those who want more will make it happen in one way or another.
7 out of ~130 is not plenty!
It is for those who need such features. You have 7 choices for fast connectivity features that have never existed before in the history of mainstream PC. A little bit of humility, please. Most PC users do not need such premium features, therefore motherboard manufacturers will not waste their time with it on many designs. Less is more.
If anyone needs significantly more connectivity, we also have next tier, HEDT and workstation boards. Also, there's an option for crowd-funding for enough big group of users who need specific solutions. If there were only 2 options, I'd grant that it's limited, but it's still not one or none. When I was looking for a new board, I wanted Thunderbolt 4 dual port on AMD AM4 ATX board. There was none... until Pro Art B550 came out. And I bought it. One single board with what I want! Amazing! Sure, you can say that glass is half empty, but it's also half full at the same time. Something to be appreciated.
You can plug a USB-NIC into a smart-TV or AVR?
Yes, USB2.0 adapter, like this one. You get ~300 Mbps. But again, very niche, almost no one in the world needs it apart from a few geeks tinkering with a handful of files with bit rate above 100 Mbps. For 4K streaming of audio-video content, 100 Mbps LAN ports are enough. Pragmatic engineers don't like to be wasteful. Besides, WiFi on TV is faster, need there be. Even some AVRs that costs $6,000-7,000 have old 100 Mbps ports. Nothing unusual if you are aware of the fact how content distribution and bit rate work on those devices.
Not sure if any of you remember this old leak, but this is pretty much X870E. Obviously this says PCIe Gen4 in a lot of places, which since this was leaked, we know is Gen 5.
View attachment 333312
I remember this one. Interestingly, none of board vendors have introduced one single board with DP 2.1 port at 40 Gbps from Zen4 iGPU. There is always more capability within CPUs than board vendors are willing to expose. If I am not mistaken, only Asrock exposed HDMI 2.1 FRL ports from iGPU at 32 Gbps and perhaps one Gigabyte board. Everybody else use old HDMI 2.0 at 18 Gbpps, which does not work with 4K/60Hz 10-bit RGB image and above on monitors, which needs ~20 Gbps over minimum FRL3 signalling.
Pricing was meant to be much lower originally, but everyone jacked them up due to increased shipping cost, increased material costs and what not. From Computex to launch that year, most boards went up by US$50 compared to the pricing I was given at Computex by one manufacturer.
It's complicated. Several new technologies were introduced, such as PCIe 5.0 and DDR5. Initially, materials and parts for new technologies are more expensive. Plus, let's not pretend that the global pandemic did not occur. It pludged many parts of the world into inflationary spiral whereby prices of most goods went up, especially energy, plus stagnating wages in many sectors, with lower increase than inflation rate. To be honest, my bread, milk and butter went up more in price than most new gen motherboards. My electricity and gas bills went much higher than motherboard prices. So, it's all relative.
