Ah, I see. You've decided that ITX should be premium so that's the end of the discussion and everyone else's side of the discussion is invalid because it's only an opinion. "Nothing elitist about that" he says from his gold-plated throne atop Mt. Privilege!
It's not opinion. I can tell you now that 6-7 years ago the mITX premium was way smaller than it is now. mITX boards suddenly got expensive after AM4, round about when Coffee Lake was arriving on the scene. I used to build shoebox PCs in Silverstone Sugo cases and up until Skylake the cost premium was insignificant, close to nil if you got lucky with a board or case on sale - and the decision to go super-small with SFX PSU restrictions being easily the single contributor to a price premium. The last time mITX was around the same price as normal ATX/mATX build was back in the B350 era of 1st-gen Ryzens.
Also, if compact boards are so expensive to make, why do Dell, HP, Lenovo all make puny little mITX SFFs with everything crammed into one tiny board for less than their mATX mini-tower variants of the same exact spec? Take the Optiplex 7010, for example i5-13500, 16GB, 256GB drive and apart from the fact that the mITX version uses the 13500T with a reduced TDP, it's £569 vs £772 for the mATX mini tower. That's a huge cost saving that shouldn't exist if mITX is supposed to be the premium option from manufacturing complexities.
Your statement has holes, the reasoning seems flawed, and it ignores historical evidence. Even if you say you're not being dismissive, you are being dismissive. If you don't know why mITX got expensive, then just say that, or at least put forward a hypothesis that isn't "stop being poor, just spend more money".
Or buy mATX and don't try and pretend ITX is necessary or even desirable for a budget build, the cases are cheaper, compatibility with cheaper ATX PSUs, easier cooling, you're entirely misrepresenting much of what I'm saying and projecting quite a bit. I haven't decided ITX should be premium, it's an observation of reality. Noone really cares about ITX except enthusiasts that want to make a smaller build, or those who want to make a media PC, who'd likely be better off with a NUC, or a mATX board with lots of room for SATA ports for budget bulk storage (my ITX board only has room for two SATA connections). Ask your average budget gamer "is a tiny PC your priority or do you want something big enough that it's easy to build in for a newbie, and doesn't require special power supplies and other components like cooling?" I know what they'd likely answer. There's no real practical advantage or "need" for the form factor, beyond some enthusiast details such as it being nice to get relatively cheap 1DPC boards instead of paying £600+ for special memory overclocking ATX boards, and the tiny cases being aesthetically pleasing and convenient to have on your desk, like this Corsair case, but those points also apply to mATX. This isn't elitism, it's just observation. The priority of a budget gamer shouldn't be fancy form factors, it should be getting the most bang for their buck. Good thing there's some great and cheap mATX options then.
Boards suddenly got more expensive after AM4 because suddenly eight core CPUs and i9s that could draw 300 W+ of power became the norm, and even entry level/mid range builds got a lot more cores, along with a lot of other features and bandwidth advances becoming standard.
In the Skylake era you're referring to, the top tier Intel CPU had four cores with HT, mid range was four cores without HT, and the entry level were dual cores, with PCIe gen 3 which didn't require redrivers and that was only used for the GPU in an ITX board. Now chips have 24 cores at the top tier and 14 at the mid range. Entry level chips have six cores. Storage used to be a few low bandwidth 600 MB/s SATA ports that the chipset could handle, maybe with a single M.2 slot that was likely also SATA. Now it's multiple M.2 PCIe slots (that also happen to physically take significantly more space on boards than a SATA port) that need to handle upwards of 14 GB/s, or half that for Gen 4 boards. RAM topped out around 3200 MT DDR4, not 8000 MT DDR5. IO was a simple mix of USB 2 and 3.0 type A. None of this high bandwidth multi role active cable, power delivery, type C/USB4 stuff we see today. No advanced PCIe signalling or heavily shielded traces with redrivers, nor many layer motherboards needed for signal integrity with all this bandwidth flying around. Chipsets were small, low power, low bandwidth single chip solutions. Now? My own ITX board literally moved the audio chipset, BIOS/reset buttons and two USB ports to a desktop solution connected by a long USB cable, because there was no space for it on the motherboard. My second M.2 slot is in a vertical riser daughter PCB with the dual chipset design having two mini fans and circuitry going into 3D space with triple stacked riser cards/heatsinks and pin connections etc. My first M.2 is on the backside of the board, which also has a heatsink and a backplate to deal with the heat from a small VRM with physically fewer power stages than larger boards, but compensating with higher ampage rating parts designed to power an overclocked 16 core chip. Half of my fan/RGB connections and all of my SATA ports (all two of them) are on another vertical daughter PCB. Motherboards in general have gotten more expensive because they're more complex, and special form factor boards are no exception. In fact I'd argue that the tiny boards like ITX, even extending to smartphones and laptops with their stacked motherboard designs, are
more complex than bigger boards with equivalent specs.
Does this Optiplex 7010 you're using as an example have a good VRM (to handle something more than a 13500T 35 watt office CPU, which is a lower TDP than the CPU of even a budget gaming laptop)? Good IO? High bandwidth PCIe ports? Lots of M.2 connectivity? A decent audio solution? Modern IO such as USB4/TB4? Support for RAM in excess of 7000MT? Does it even have any PCIe slots? Or is it another mass produced (read my earlier comment about economies of scale) board designed around the bare minimum tier parts, probably with something like a 150 W PSU with a non standard design? Because that is what office grade PCs generally are.
I don't know how or why any of this is controversial or elitist. They're just observations. More and more features have been added with each platform generation, and there's only so much space on a standard ITX form factor board. I suspect this is why the IMPACT series that was previously discussed moved to miniDTX.
I got the Gene because I want to test 8000+ and it will do that for the next CPUs as well.
I have a feeling the IMC will only inch up to 6600-6800 UCLK (1:1) for this 9000 series.
Someone on eBay is seller a whole pallet worth. Only 6 left.
I hope so, but AMD had to change the MC/IF gear ratio to 3:2 though just to get RAM working at low DDR5 speeds (compared to Intel), the Zen 4/AM5 IF isn't really clocked much higher (if at all, IF 2000 MHz, RAM 2000 MHz/4000 MT was possible on Zen 3, I ran that for about a year) than it was on Zen 3 with DDR4, and Zen/AM5 isn't moving to a revised IO/Chiplet design till Zen 6 which will use an active interposer, allowing for much higher frequencies.
Currently the sweet spot for Zen 4 is 2000 MHz Infinity Fabric and 3000 MHz/6000 MT RAM, which is no better than a good Zen 3 chip could do, besides the RAM being out of sync.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the "sweet spot" for Zen 5 was only conservatively bumped up to 3100 MHz 6200 MT RAM/2066 IF. That would be in line with the ~100 MHz IF jump from the sweetspot 3800 MT RAM/1900 IF Zen 3 had to Zen 4.
