The state of motherboard evolution

[Ciric]

Just been watching the Gigabyt G1 video, and Tom's "rant" got me thinking: "is it a good or a bad sign, that the main thing which differentiate the motherboards, are their design and colour scheme?"

Back in the 775 and 1366 days, there was some real differences between the boards. -especially when talking about overclocking. Theese days, unless you go for some LN2 benching and such, it doesn't really matter.

I know a lot of it, has to do with the way you OC a modern cpu. Since we aren't punishing the chipset, the same way we did when we were pushing +500MHz fsb's on the 775 boards.

Thaught's?

Is the past years development, (or the lack of it), a good or a bad thing for entusiats?

Apart from design and price, what could make you choose a specific board over another?

 

[sheroo]

I'm a bit disappointed that boards aren't more specialized. One thing that really annoys me is that the more expensive a board is the more stuff that's on it that you don't need to seemingly justify its higher price tag. I've thought for a while now that you need boards to specialise a bit more. The main area I'm thinking of is for home server duties. If you want a motherboard with a lot of sata ports - you have to pay for all the other stuff you don't want. Why not make a bog standard board with shed loads of sata ports and non of the other expensive audio and other stuff.

For me the expensive boards have too many sata ports - how many do most of use?

 

[Silver Sparrow]

I can definitely see how it may be a good thing that technology has matured to the point where we're able to get a lot more features and tech for the same price and so motherboards do become rather similar.

But I'm seeing this drought of change in variety of the motherboard market across the board as a knock on effect of both less demanding games being made overall and AMD essentially pulling out of the big x86 chip race (temporarily I hope). Because of that (and certainly other factors) PC enthusiasts have no reason to upgrade and in doing so companies are trying to appeal to the biggest trend, I guess black/red is that trend, to score whatever sales there might be in the West (black/gold in Asia).

For me the expensive boards have too many sata ports - how many do most of use?

I use two ports for two SSD's. But I only have two sata 6gb ports so the z77 chipset and my needs are perfectly in tune

I do agree with you there doesn't need to be so many sata ports on gaming orientated boards especially with m.2 now in the wild and leave it for WS focused boards. But I guess its a case of the z97 chipset supporting that many ports and doesn't cost much to implement so why not...

Just looked on OCUK at the new z97 motherboard range, Gigabytes range has half or more a variant of black/red[10 of 22]. Seriously couldn't tell the difference between the selection and how they differed besides the price :huh: . MSI a third are black/red, Asus has three and Asrock has one. Also annoying none offer truly black boards. Asrock tends to but they scrapped that with z97.

How do I feel overall, rather sad tbh. This up coming Christmas is my time to build a new PC having put money aside for it and looking whats currently on offer hasn't excited me nearly as much as my current PC build did. I hope X99 dishes out the juice!