Unhinged Rant About Motherboards
- Thread starter RavenXXX2
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He's not wrong. I've just had to buy a mid tier board to get some features that I wanted which could have been included on a low end board.
Wanted temp sensor, bios flashback, M2 latches, PCIe release button and colour coded rear audio jacks.
Ended up buying the cheapest Strix board I could find which also comes with fairy lights and a bunch of connectivity and OC features that I'll never use.
Wanted temp sensor, bios flashback, M2 latches, PCIe release button and colour coded rear audio jacks.
Ended up buying the cheapest Strix board I could find which also comes with fairy lights and a bunch of connectivity and OC features that I'll never use.
Yep, my current Z77 Mpower has V-Check Points Set to attach a meter, Debug LED panel, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sure it was 10 year ago, but only cost £150 lol.
Motherboard prices are an absolute rip off, will have to buy a basic no thrills motherboard for £200+
Motherboard prices are an absolute rip off, will have to buy a basic no thrills motherboard for £200+
Soldato
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He is not wrong, however... When he said things should be a modular system so you buy what you need, this has already been tried in the server space with RAID activation keys and then HEDT with VROC, and was an utter failure and caused more problems than it was worth and the only people that benefited were the manufacturers that were charging £125 to supply a VROC/RAID key that just activated a function that was already on the board.
My feedback from manufacturers on the issue is that something like this is a function that warrants additional price if you want it, otherwise then do like 95%+ of customers do and not care about it. Yes i can see the benefit to the end user being able to diagnose faults easier, however they are of the opinion that support should be down to the reseller to provide and deal with as they make more money on the product than they do.
My feedback from manufacturers on the issue is that something like this is a function that warrants additional price if you want it, otherwise then do like 95%+ of customers do and not care about it. Yes i can see the benefit to the end user being able to diagnose faults easier, however they are of the opinion that support should be down to the reseller to provide and deal with as they make more money on the product than they do.
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Adding the hardware and charging for a key to use it is not a modular system, NOT adding the hardware and charging for a card is a modular system. I think the motherboard should not have everything integrated as this is very wasteful. Its good for chip manufacturers as they get to sell to people that will never use the chips but it’s bad for buyers. The only thing it adds is convenience and cost and if a chip is bad you have to RMA all of it. One of the new excuses is: “GPU’s are so big all the slots are now unusable”, so redesign the boards to have the GPU in a place that does not block the slots, they should do this anyway, it not like they did not know! Integrated WIFI is normally just a slot with a small card plugged in under the back IO shield and now the sound is basically an Integrated USB sound card, both are easy to get and add if you need them. Nic’s are also easy to get and add and if it goes bad you don’t need to throw the entire board. Also, adding all the RGB ****, that’s also easy to add if you want it.
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Soldato
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To be fair, the size of GPUS is down to the GPU manufacturer not the motherboard manufacturer. A GPU manufacturer makes a GPU that requires a cooler that covers 4 bloody slots is their problem. There is only so much real estate on an ATX format motherboard that unfortunately they cannot magic up space if the GPU manufacturer decides to go ham on the cooling to build their product because Nvidia are chasing numbers. Also there are significantly more GPUs out there than 4090 and even then if you need to use additional slots on the motherboard then there 2 slot AIO versions available.
Best of luck with the Strix board. I just returned mine since the stupidly high VRM cover would mean running my existing Noctua fan at 90 degree rotation.
There's definitely a lot of metal hanging off the board and not a lot of clearance in places. On the upside the temps are good. Doing up the top left thumbscrew on the cpu block was - fun.
Luckily I don't have a fan in the back of the case, running top and front radiators as exhaust with the back and bottom as passive intakes.
Could please you elaborate a bit more?
I'm tempted by the Strix B650E E as it has the optical out (a feature missing from cheaper boards) that I need. I'm planning to pair it with my existing Tc14-PE cooler which is similar in size to the large Noctua coolers. From the pictures of the board the heatsinks don't look excessively tall.
FYI: B650 Tomahawk has rear spdif.
Saw this yesterday. He does sum up my general mood with the motherboard market right now.
Starting to feel like the regulators should step in and tell them to stop price fixing, because there isn't really a justification for current pricing other than "we think people will pay that much"...
Thanks I'll give that one a look.
It seems a few more motherboard have been released recently. Still overprice but better than some of the others. Do you know of any others that have an optical / SPDIF?
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Gigabyte B650 Aorus Pro AX, MSI B650 Carbon & B650 Edge, ASRock Steel Legend B650E, NZXT B650E N7.
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Quite honestly - it's not unhinged at all. There's so much hinge here it could be a barn door!
I'm in the situation where I want to upgrade my 11th gen i5 (just 'cos) but I just can't bring myself to pay the eye-watering price of the equivalent mobo - I've had the ASUS ROG Strix -e board for the last 3 (? I think) generations, but I just can't pay the price they're asking. I now find myself casting around, looking for something that fits and I'm at a loss...
I'm in the situation where I want to upgrade my 11th gen i5 (just 'cos) but I just can't bring myself to pay the eye-watering price of the equivalent mobo - I've had the ASUS ROG Strix -e board for the last 3 (? I think) generations, but I just can't pay the price they're asking. I now find myself casting around, looking for something that fits and I'm at a loss...
Which CPU are you getting? If you're going Intel, you could buy the B660-F, the snag is it would probably need a BIOS flash for 13th gen (but it does have flashback).
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Intel for sure, I'm undecided on DDR5 or keeping the 32Gb of DDR 4 I'm presently running. The money saved would allow me to get an i7- rather than the i5- but even then: gaming-wise, (prime use) the i7- is not necessarily worth it. My main stipulation is that it needs 4x M2. as I've got 4 NVME drives in use at present.
Ah, I think that would rule you out of most B760/B660 boards unfortunately, since it is Z790/Z690 that routinely has 4 M.2 slots. There's a possibility (lanes/exclusions permitting) you could use the second full length PCI-E slot (which usually has 4 lanes) for an M.2 adapter card, but once you buy that, it would likely be cheaper to just get the MSI Z690-A (or other entry-level Z790/Z690 board).