Soldato
It's assthetics and it only artificially inflates pricing per actual quality and even worsers functionality.
Like VRM cooling being sabotaged by those "IO covers".
Even that Colorful has that heatsink seriously bad for its size:
Flat slab has little surface area.
And functionality sabotaging cents/pennies for makers become fast €/£ for us.
Not to mention no doubt extra special gaming bling bling profit margin.
I suspect motherboards prices have moved up at least one step because of all that garbage.
I don’t think the VRMs are being covered to the point of causing any heat issues, certainly nothing people should be concerned about especially given the amount of VRMs (MOSFETs) and the spread of heat.
I don’t like the plastic crap though, so will likely remove if possible.
That colourful one looks like a terrible design for the VRM heatsink however! Looks like a 8+2 using doublers looking at how they’re grouped.