ASUS & Gigabyte Expect Motherboard Sales to Drop 25% This Year

During the darkest times during the (hopefully now past) graphics card shortage, many manufacturers looked to find ways to soften the blow of the individual cost of a GPU. Many choose to go down the ‘bundle’ road offering motherboards and graphics cards together at a set price. – Not a bad idea at the time if you were looking to build a new PC and wanted to at least attempt to save some money.

With the graphics card situation finally looking to be returning to normal though, it seems that both ASUS and Gigabyte don’t see any immediate future in such deals. As such, following a report via TechSpot, they now expect to see motherboard sales across 2022 fall by around 25%.

ASUS & Gigabyte Predict Huge Motherboard Sales Drop

With graphics cards finally costing about what they should, the need for bundles attempting to sweeten the deal has fallen off a metaphorical cliff. – Put simply, you can just buy a graphics card now without the need, or option, to save money by looking for offers with motherboards (or any other component) ‘thrown’ in with it. GPU prices have fallen so hard so quickly that the deals, while decent based on what was happening at the time, don’t really work anymore!

With that being said though, it was clearly a shrewd move for companies such as ASUS and Gigabyte as it provided a far greater than usual boost to their motherboard sales. With such deals now being pretty much redundant in terms of actually getting a GPU at a relatively fair price though, they now anticipate that their respective motherboard sales figures will likely fall (year on year) by around 25%.

What Do We Think?

This isn’t, of course, to say that motherboard sales are strictly speaking down. It’s more the fact that during this period, they went up quite notable as people were willing to go down practically any avenue to get a new graphics card. With the upcoming release of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD’s AM5 platform, motherboard sales are undoubtedly going to spike a fair bit come September/October. The bottom line though is that consumers don’t really have to explore these ‘bundle’ options anymore!

Now, with that being said, bundle deals can still clearly be excellent for consumers. And especially those looking to build brand new systems within fairly set budget limits. – For the moment though, GPU availability, and prices, are somewhat back to normal making deals such as this with ASUS and Gigabyte a lot less attractive than they once were.

What do you think though? Do bundle deals like the ones offered by Gigabyte and ASUS work? Did you actually explore this avenue just to get a new graphics card? – Let us know in the comments!