Thanks to increasing world market prices of copper, the major retail motherboard manufacturers are looking at increasing their motherboard prices by about 10 percent or so come April. This is bad news for Intel, as this will end up coinciding with Intel's launch of its Ivy Bridge processors and the new 7-series chipsets.

The price of copper has increased by over US$600 per tonne in only a few weeks' time and even though motherboards only use a few hundred grams of copper, the increased cost per tonne is still going to have an adverse effect on motherboard pricing. It's also likely lead to increased costs of other computer components such as high-end graphics cards which use 10 layer PCBs.

On top of everything else, wages in China are going up which is further helping to increase the cost for the motherboard makers. Even so, according to Digitimes, Asus is expecting to see an increase in motherboard shipments by 10 percent, with Gigabyte expecting an increase of as much as 20 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same quarter last year.

Update: We were contacted by Gigabyte with regards to this story and the company stated that it is not expecting any increase to the pricing of its motherboards and the information posted on Digitimes is incorrect as far as Gigabyte is concerned. Gigabyte is expecting to launch its next generation of LGA-1155 motherboards at similar price points as its current LGA-1155 motherboards, depending on the feature set on offer. The company is also expecting to see improved performance of the new motherboards compared to its current range of LGA-1155 models.