ASUS and Gigabyte Don't Think They'll Sell That Many Motherboards

One wouldn't expect this, not so soon after the recent news from Intel anyway, but motherboard makers are losing optimism in regards to product sales for this quarter.

Intel just launched the Sandy Bridge-E series of CPUs (central processing units).

Featuring the LGA2011 socket, they are the latest and greatest chips that Intel ever made for consumers.

We even reviewed the Core i7-3960X, so everyone can get a clear idea of what they are getting into.

Unfortunately, some motherboard makers aren't exactly enthusiastic even now.

What this means is not that they don't like the chips, but that they don't expect them, and the new motherboards designed for them, to boost overall mainboard sales that much.

In fact, ASUS and Gigabyte outright reduced their estimates of how many motherboards they expect to sell this quarter.

Where they once thought the fourth quarter (October-December) of 2011 would lead to decent enough shipments, they now expect the final figures to be 10-20% lower than the projections.

Digitimes reports this, noting that Gigabyte already shipped 30% fewer motherboards in October, compared to September.

Now, the company is reducing inventory levels from 3-4 weeks to 1-2 weeks, even though November will still show a slight rise, if only because October was such a let down.

For the whole October-December period, Gigabyte expects a slowdown of over 20% (before this, it thought the decrease would be of 10-15%).

As for ASUS, its shipments will dip by more than 10% sequentially (it used to think it could get away with 5%).

As some may or may not have assumed by now, HDDs are blamed for all this, or at least their impending shortage is.

Since PCs are going to have trouble selling because of insufficient storage units, it only makes sense that all other makers of hardware for the DIY market would become more cautious as well.