Ah, Abit, my first motherboard love...
I've had so many Abit motherboards over the years. Even had the fabled BP6 with a pair of Celeron 300's at 450MHz. I think the second CPU actually never did anything, but hey...
They were way ahead of their time though, as they even got rid of the PS/2 ports at one point, only problem was, you couldn't install Windows XP on those boards, as it didn't detect USB mice in its early iterations.
There are reasons for the increased costs, as we've gone from fairly simple motherboards, to rather complex motherboards these days. Most are also very over-specced, to a degree that you're paying for things you'll never use, much like my second Celeron processor...
I mean, what did you get back then on a high-end board? Crap sound, if any sound at all, no Ethernet for the longest of times and sometimes even then, it was a turd, the add-in card interfaces were quite simple, at least compared to PCIe 4.0, fairly low speed storage interfaces and so on... Ok, it was high-tech back then, but it wasn't as complicated. Also, looking at some board pictures, most boards had 2-3 power phases for the CPU, even on the high-end boards, now you're looking at a minimum of six, unless it's a really crappy board, but a dozen on more on high-end boards. Component quality has increased massively as well, anyone remember the issues MSI had with those crappy capacitors that popped? I think it affected other companies too, but them worse than most. Now you can take a budget board and put a 12-core CPU in it and it'll still work, back then, the board would've blown up.
I also remember my dad buying our first computer, a Mitac 386SX-16, it was around US$2,700 back then, which is around US$4,000 in today's money, not exactly cheap and it can't even compete with an entry level smartphone today. But yes, this "hobby" is getting expensive.
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