2 DIMMs are only goood for the most basic POS's of PC's, like a office PC, and if you ever wanted to upgrade you gotta spend twice as much for the RAM, 4DIMMS is always the best way to go.
VRM cooling again is something people dont think of till they put in a more power CPU and realise its under performing, again only good for the most basic POS office PC's. Plenty of youtube Videos showing how bad these budget Motherboards are with higher end CPUs
That's what ASRock HDV motherboards are for: basic POS office PCs.
We can expect ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte to make something better at a similar price. They always do. ASRock HDV is trash.
Every series of motherboards B, H and Z are more expensive than ever before, so its not a surprise, it all started with coffee lake refresh z390, the increased power requirements forced board partners to use better parts, resulting in higher prices gen after gen, with alder lake consumes slightly more power than previous gen, its bound to be more expensive
This motherboard's VRM only has one MOSFET more than the H510M HDV (not one power stage. one MOSFET). That does not justify a significant price increase. To be honest $85 isn't that much higher than the previous generations, but it's not really improved either.
But Alder Lake
doesn't consume more power than the previous generation. Thankfully. If it did this board would be DOA (just as its predecessor was).
The Intel Core i9-12900K is Intel's flagship processor for the Alder Lake architecture. In our testing, we saw fantastic gaming performance from this new processor. Not only low-threaded tests have improved, the 12900K can even beat AMD at highly threaded workloads.
www.techpowerup.com
The stress test has higher power usage for 12th gen CPUs because the GPU is less bottlenecked with 12th gen CPUs so can run faster. All the CPU-only benchmarks show that the 12th gen processors use less power than their 11th gen counterparts.
Some very high end boards only have 2 memory slots. i wonder why that is.
It's better for memory stability when overclocking. If you have 4 memory slots, signals can "overshoot" and reflect from the the other slot within each channel, and cause interference. Having fewer memory traces also means you can give them better shielding. This means that motherboards with only 2 memory slots normally support much higher memory speeds than similar motherboards with the same number of PCB layers but with 4 slots.
On Die Termination mitigates the interference, but doesn't completely prevent it, and if you don't have a DIMM in the second slot it will make very little difference.
Source:
https://blog.csdn.net/velanjun/article/details/79460670