Entry level motherboards are still $100.
$300+ is a very high end motherboard.
The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards.
Some people really want the best of the best and feel the need to buy motherboards with Thunderbolt 4 and other future-proofing measures just in case they might need them, but it's premium and luxury territory.
Entry level motherboards were $50 (meaning 40 on sale)
It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard.
More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a lot of people with expensive, outdated "futureproofed" builds who would have been better off saving the money on the original purchase so they could upgrade sooner instead.
Then you get a new board designed for the new features instead of something several years old and you come out $100 on top.
Futureproofing is nonsense. PCs just don't work that way, and haven't for decades.
Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.
I don't remember Win10 being particularly lean (although I'm sure 11 is worse). And the M4 is definitely a much more powerful CPU. Can you not run Firefox and uBO on that? Or have they really weighed things down that much with the OS somehow?
> Probably same or better on Linux.
Even with the Cinnamon desktop environment I can vouch it uses considerably less RAM for just the desktop (ordinary applications are probably about the same) and offers much faster filesystem access by default. I'm sure this is at least partly due to not being weighed down by built-in anti-malware (that would do basically nothing for people who are comfortable using Linux in the first place).
I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available.
I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without.
The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least).
The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
This is obnoxiously difficult to shop for in the desktop/workstation space.
Unfortunately, as far as finding something cheaper than that, you're looking for a product that appeals to a very small to non-existent market demographic.
Most of the buyers who want workstation boards (companies) do not want a computer that requires assembly.
The demographic that builds their own PC is almost exclusively doing so to play games.
Everyone else who wants to use a computer wants a portable laptop.
The good news is that all the complaints you have about gaming boards are mostly cosmetic. There's nothing unreliable about gaming boards. They all support the specs they claim to support. You don't have to use any overclocking features (I don't). They are off by default.
If you want low idle power consumption, what you actually want is a system that has soldered RAM (LPDDR) which essentially goes against the other parameters of what you asked for. You don't want a module desktop PC at all if that's your parameter. What you really want is a mini PC or a Mac mini.
You're asking for a workstation board with low idle power consumption, but nobody who wants that is optimizing for low idle power consumption.
The best system for you is probably an HP, Dell, or Lenovo workstation PC. The good news for you is that these are all over eBay as corporations tend to sell them in bulk when they're done with them in just a few short years. They're reliable, quiet, and have low idle power consumption. Or, you can go with the big workstations that support ECC RAM.
We can talk all day long about how my mom waited tables for $2/hour and her first car cost $5,000 brand new, it's not relevant anymore.
