Chris will have to comment on the new grades himself. But a plastic socket MB is a plastic socket MB
As for integrated, or in the tech industry, embedded, boards? My guess would be low peripheral for tab BGA boards.
This has always been a difficult category for boardsort, for scrap in general. Given my less consumer-level work, I’ve seen these boards grow in quantity over the last 5 years and have had multiple discussions with the Chris over now-what boards. Technology is in the midst of another major change; something I pointed out about two years ago. What was once known as a client or thin-client is now a normal mid-to-high end desktop. Process size (how big individual components need to be) has shrunk so much that what used to be 10-15 chips on a board now reside in a single chip, the CPU. This mess started with AMD’s Epic and ARM64mx. In time I’d expect to see these CPUs break off and get their in classes.
Today we have Via, AMD, HP, and Apple making CPUs that contain 90+% of what was on the board 5 years ago.
Value is likely to be in flux over the next year to 18 months for everything as Chris, and all scrap buyers, adjust to this new encore. Motherboards have gone from a know value—to the value of a single chip, the metal used for the layers, and the type and number of connectors.
Think of it this way. Intel has moved the NB, SB, MMU, I/O, and 3 bus chips into the processor. AMD has moved all memory instructions and control systems to the new Epic CPUs. Both have added the graphics on-board.
In the cases of ARM64 like the apple M, POWER/POWR like the HP and Dell mini-servers. These go even further. The RAM is in the CPU now. And while apple has a MB the size of a large book today, the HP thin line has a board the size of two credit cards.
expansion slots are a growing thing of the past.
Today, a pre-built computer gives most of the case size over to ports and expansion, not the MB. And there’s a drive now to move all expansion to external USB4 and Thunderbolt boxes for m2 and PCIe cards.
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