Nice… but £150 for a m-itx board is getting crazy

Here's me umming and ahhing about spending £150 on a CPU upgrade, and some people spend that on a motherboard! I know there should be a bit of a premium for the form factor, but I'd probably increase my maximum spend on a board from £70 to £90 if I was dead set on getting a small one due. And it's a niche platform which will probably have no upgrade potential. I think any CPU / mobo reviews need to consider total cost of ownership compared against similar performing setups.

I did find a cheap Core i5 8400 on Ebay but since I have a mini-ITX system,once I looked at the utterly ripoff prices for the Z370 mini-ITX motherboards I shelved the idea. The cheapest Z370 based mini-ITX motherboard is like £130 so that means the better locked B360 ones are probably going to be going close to that price at the top level.

Plus,now it seems the Z390 based motherboards are starting to be spotted:

https://videocardz.com/73974/first-intel-z390-motherboard-spotted

I think I will have to delay my platform upgrade another year at this rate(unless my current setup has issues) - its no point if the CPU is good value if companies whack you with motherboard and RAM costs instead,and try to recoup costs elsewhere. IIRC,this has been done before,ie,cheaper CPUs but things like motherboards actually cost more than they should have.

Edit!!

Just realised I have been on my IB Core i7 for close to 4 years(and been on socket 1155 just after the B3 chipsets were launched). I don't think I have ever had a CPU that long IIRC!

CAT-THE-FIFTH
Just realised I have been on my IB Core i7 for close to 4 years(and been on socket 1155 just after the B3 chipsets were launched). I don't think I have ever had a CPU that long IIRC!

i7 2600K here still going very strong. I just do not see a compelling reason to change to the modern crop of CPUs when I get little perceptible difference.

Yeah it runs fairly warm, but the 1070 generates a generous amount of heat and that is the ‘modern’ component in my system. ( now on a 240mm radiator to itself, never goes over 40 ;) ).

The only thing that I would be upgrading for at this point in time would be to get a NVMe M.2 but again, that is a luxury I can do without while SSD prices are just silly.

s1lv3r
i7 2600K here still going very strong. I just do not see a compelling reason to change to the modern crop of CPUs when I get little perceptible difference.

Yeah it runs fairly warm, but the 1070 generates a generous amount of heat and that is the ‘modern’ component in my system. ( now on a 240mm radiator to itself, never goes over 40 ;) ).

The only thing that I would be upgrading for at this point in time would be to get a NVMe M.2 but again, that is a luxury I can do without while SSD prices are just silly.

For me its primarily for one game,but the rest of them seem fine,so I think I just need to hold off and see how things go.

Far too expensive for my liking.