It possible could mean the site I was on only revealed MBs for AMD for £200.00 upwards, meaning they will not sell a board that is not guaranteed to function resulting in a more expensive board.
But under reviews I could not find consistency as there have been many complaints that ether the cheaper MBs fot AMD needed a lot of configuration and Bois update to function correctly or even to function.
Some needed to return the cheaper MBs and opt for the more expensive one to get the AMD and the memory to work
It’s possible that you are thinking of some of the initial high prices at the time of launch where there was fairly low stock levels so some retailers were price gouging.
We were talking about the X570 boards and they ALL work with the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.
Maybe you have confused this with the situation where the previous 400 series and older boards needed a BIOS update to work with the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs?
That is normal procedure for most platforms and not limited to AMD, although in some cases you can even update the BIOS with some boards without a CPU present. AMD also offered a free service where they would mail you an old CPU so you could install that to upgrade the BIOS prior to installing the 3000 series; free postage both ways.
My thoughts are AMD are offering the better package once you can assure the hardware you choice is a working one and does not bring a lot of head bang
My general advice is don’t buy into a platform in the first 3 months at least unless you have to. I say this for hardware and for O/S releases.
I bought an Asus board with the Intel 6 series chipset that had a recall due to a fault with the SATA controller. They recalled every board from every manufacturer at a cost of around three quarters of a Billion dollars.
Generally I’d say Intel tend to have less teething issues on release but they are usually just that and not deal breakers. Many of them seem to relate to not being able to run RAM at the maximum speed. Hardly a big deal and wait for a few BIOS updates and that tends to get resolved.
I’m not aware of there being so many issues with the Ryzen 3000 series as with previous ones.
As the quality of their hardware continues to put Intel to shame and sales increase it seems as if vendors are giving a lot more attention to optimising for AMD. There are RAM kits which have optimised profiles for Ryzen CPUs for example.
Keep in mind that initial reviews are more likely to find issues and my sense is that AMD release stuff on tighter timescales and definitely budgets. My wait 3 month rule is definitely in play with AMD.
You seem to be more of a glass half empty guy when it comes to AMD?
I am conservative so tend to favour Intel for various reasons.
But when I look at all the security issues they have had over the last 2 years which have required updates that reduce performance I find it harder to recommend Intel. They are certainly no longer the conservative choice of 2 years ago.
Then there’s their increasing loss of power efficiency which now leaves them way behind AMD.
They’ll be back but maybe not for a couple of years.