Rant: Why do gamers buy expensive motherboards?

[UltraMega]

I think most of us come from OCN, which means most of us were around when overclocking was meaningful. Does anyone think it's meaningful today? Does the tweaking you get from a ~$300 motherboard justify the cost?

 

If your focus is gaming, I tend to think a cheaper motherboard is better. If the sky is the limit, then by all means get an expensive board, but on any budget at all, it always seems more logical to me to get for a ~$120-$150 board, CPU that doesn't need expensive cooling, then push the left over money from not going overboard on the motherboard and cooling on a faster GPU and/or ram. 

 

Maybe for intel, it's a little more justified (barely) since there is still a little bit of OC headroom there, but not for AMD. 

 

 

How do you guys see the trade off in cost between CPU, mobo, and cooling playing out today?

 

I see it as, for example, something like a 7700X with a ~$150 cooler vs a 7700 and a $30 cooler. I'd rather spend the extra $150 somewhere else and lose a few % in CPU performance. 

 

How do you guys prioritize CPU, mobo, and cooling in a post overclocking era? Maybe this is the wrong crowd since a lot of people here like to setup exotic cooling just for fun, but on a budget, how would you prioritize these things with today's hardware? 

Edited Saturday at 18:34 by UltraMega

[Sir Beregond]

To be fair, a lot of features I used to be able to get on a $150 motherboard no longer exist on $150 motherboards which is part of the problem.

 

And you are approaching the overclocking discussion from the position of a gamer. Absolutely for a plug and play gamer, there's zero reason to be overspending on parts like a motherboard.

 

Enthusiast boards on the other hand are absolutely built for...well, enthusiasts. That is the person whose game is to bench hardware, do LN2 cooling, try to break records, etc. which is its own hobby. These are the people who will delid a CPU, or try some janky mods all for the pursuit of better performance. While there could be overlap with gamers, we're not exactly talking the same demographic. Your Joe Average gamer isn't doing that, and they would be completely wasting their money on ASUS Apex and EVGA Kingpin boards.

 

Now onto the topic of overclocking, are we actually in a "post overclocking era"? Maybe in the traditional sense, but we aren't really passed the era where tweaking other things matters whether its undervolting, power management, tweaking boost behaviors, memory overclocking and tweaking timing. You maybe can't do much to traditionally OC a Zen 3 non-X3D chip, but it sure loves and gains not an insignificant amount of performance from memory secondary and tertiary timing tweaking for example. There's a reason people went nuts for B-die DDR4...including gamers.

 

To circle back to your original premise, no, there is no reason for the plug and play, hasn't ever messed with a BIOS and doesn't want to gamer to buy an expensive motherboard. Are you a gamer who does actually want features that enable faster memory, you want to do more exotic cooling and do some benching? Then yeah maybe spending more to get a 2 DIMM board and other features enthusiasts like for benching is warranted.

 

It just all depends on who you are and what you actually want to do with the hardware.

Edited Saturday at 09:03 by Sir Beregond

[UltraMega]

41 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

To be fair, a lot of features I used to be able to get on a $150 motherboard no longer exist on $150 motherboards which is part of the problem.

 

And you are approaching the overclocking discussion from the position of a gamer. Absolutely for a plug and play gamer, there's zero reason to be overspending on parts like a motherboard.

 

Enthusiast boards on the other hand are absolutely built for...well, enthusiasts. That is the person whose game is to bench hardware, do LN2 cooling, try to break records, etc. which is its own hobby. These are the people who will delid a CPU, or try some janky mods all for the pursuit of better performance. While there could be overlap with gamers, we're not exactly talking the same demographic. Your Joe Average gamer isn't doing that, and they would be completely wasting their money on ASUS Apex and EVGA Kingpin boards.

 

Now onto the topic of overclocking, are we actually in a "post overclocking era"? Maybe in the traditional sense, but we aren't really passed the era where tweaking other things matters whether its undervolting, power management, tweaking boost behaviors, memory overclocking and tweaking timing. You maybe can't do much to traditionally OC a Zen 3 non-X3D chip, but it sure loves and gains not an insignificant amount of performance from memory secondary and tertiary timing tweaking for example. There's a reason people went nuts for B-die DDR4...including gamers.

 

To circle back to your original premise, no, there is no reason for the plug and play, hasn't ever messed with a BIOS and doesn't want to gamer to buy an expensive motherboard. Are you a gamer who does actually want features that enable faster memory, you want to do more exotic cooling and do some benching? Then yeah maybe spending more to get a 2 DIMM board and other features enthusiasts like for benching is warranted.

 

It just all depends on who you are and what you actually want to do with the hardware.

All good points. Part of the premise though, is if the cost is justifiable. Do you think you can get more performance out of an expensive board vs putting that cost toward better parts elsewhere? That is the real question. Are people over spending on boards to a point of performance detriment vs overall performance on a given budget? 

[ENTERPRISE]

Putting Overclocking/tweaking completely aside for one moment. Lots of gamers use their systems for more than just gaming and for that reason may focus on a boards feature sets moreover than what it's capable of in an OC scenario.

 

For example, if you want a board with decent I/O such as 10Gb networking and USB4, straight off you are throwing money at a motherboard as those feature sets demand a higher bracket of pricing. 

 

Unfortunately the "Creator" like motherboards that focus moreso on just I/O are fairly rare and to get a board with substantial I/O usually means you end up getting a motherboard with semi decent OC capabilities at any rate. Once you hit a certain price bracket, you just end up with an overall "Premium" feature set.

 

So all in all some users are almost forced into the premium range, irrespective of Overclocking. Forced sounds harsh but I find that is the best way to describe it.

 

Sure if you are using a PC for just gaming and light computing you can 100% avoid paying out extra and end up with a more budget friendly build using a mobo with a basic feature set. 

[UltraMega]

14 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Putting Overclocking/tweaking completely aside for one moment. Lots of gamers use their systems for more than just gaming and for that reason may focus on a boards feature sets moreover than what it's capable of in an OC scenario.

 

For example, if you want a board with decent I/O such as 10Gb networking and USB4, straight off you are throwing money at a motherboard as those feature sets demand a higher bracket of pricing. 

 

Unfortunately the "Creator" like motherboards that focus moreso on just I/O are fairly rare and to get a board with substantial I/O usually means you end up getting a motherboard with semi decent OC capabilities at any rate. Once you hit a certain price bracket, you just end up with an overall "Premium" feature set.

 

So all in all some users are almost forced into the premium range, irrespective of Overclocking. Forced sounds harsh but I find that is the best way to describe it.

 

Sure if you are using a PC for just gaming and light computing you can 100% avoid paying out extra and end up with a more budget friendly build using a mobo with a basic feature set. 

More good points. What kind of I/O do you use that a cheaper board doesn't have? Are you using USB4? How relevant is 10Gb networking?

 

Sorry if some of these are noob questions. I don't do heavy I/0 or heavy networking. 

[Fluxmaven]

If you hang around on forums like OCN and ExtremeHW and wonder why people spend money on higher end components you might be hanging around the wrong forums lol.

 

A e s t h e t i c s   is a big reason I see people splurge a bit more than they probably should on components. The "white tax" and "pink tax" are very real things. I've helped plenty of gamer girls build PCs and you will absolutely pay a premium to make a cute PC to avoid the "gamer aesthetic". Even if you aren't trying to do a cute build, if you want something with IO port covers, beefy heatsinks, integrated RGB etc so it doesn't look like some poverty spec board, you'll pay a premium. 

 

There's obviously a point of diminishing returns. If you buy an MSI Godlike or an Asus ROG Maximus Extreme, you are 100% doing it to flex your massive epeen. That said, your biggest counter argument seems to be, money saved on the board is better spent on other components. Do you really see people out there buying top end boards and pairing them with budget components? Most of the people on here with higher end boards already have best in socket CPUs and high end GPUs. 

 

I'd agree that for your average joe that just ascended from consoles to PC, they probably don't need a nice board since they just want plug and play. They also don't need a bunch of IO because they are used to having none coming from a console. 

 

10g networking is very relevant to anyone that has a NAS or any type of server they work off of. Higher end chipsets X670E like offer more PCIe lanes, PCI 5 support etc.

 

One other factor is availability. When new a new platform launches, they start with the high end stuff and you don't see value options pop up until later. If you do SFF builds you especially get hit hard. AFAIK on AM5 every ITX board under $270 hit the market less than a year ago.

 

 

 

[ENTERPRISE]

11 hours ago, UltraMega said:

More good points. What kind of I/O do you use that a cheaper board doesn't have? Are you using USB4? How relevant is 10Gb networking?

 

Sorry if some of these are noob questions. I don't do heavy I/0 or heavy networking. 

 

10Gb is becoming more and more relevant, especially as it is now considered affordable for your average consumer. For me, I run a NAS device, and I at times do large file transfers and having 10Gb makes life more efficient and means less time my PC has to be left on just for a transfer.

 

Hell, even with smaller files, its just nice to have quick transfers. Not to mention it allows for more concurrent transfers with less of a penalty.

 

I do not have USB4 on my current mobo but in the future it would be nice to have.

 

Of course we have only discussed external I/O and nothing of people who want to take advantage of Gen5 drives which right now at least you can only get on high end chipsets. To be fair, anyone wanting to take advantage of the latest faster storage technology will always be forced to the higher end chipsets as thats how vendors stack their product lines.

[The Pook]

2 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

10g networking is very relevant to anyone that has a NAS or any type of server they work off of. Higher end chipsets X670E like offer more PCIe lanes, PCI 5 support etc.

 

47 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

10Gb is becoming more and more relevant, especially as it is now considered affordable for your average consumer. For me, I run a NAS device, and I at times do large file transfers and having 10Gb makes life more efficient and means less time my PC has to be left on just for a transfer.

 

no onboard 10 GbE = no buy for me, it's 2024 and it should be a requirement on any $300+ board 

 

it's a shame that the boards that have onboard 10 GbE is limited and most (all?) of the AM5/1700 boards with it use the AQC113 NIC which has documented issues 

[Snakecharmed]

Sir Beregond nailed the main points. Here's a few more unorganized odds-and-ends that come to my mind on this topic:

 

Regarding features, one thing that Steve of GamersNexus has ranted about in recent times was the disappearance of the 7-segment display from all but the highest-end desktop CPU boards. With how AM5 was with DDR5 memory training and the excruciatingly slow boot times early on in the platform's lifecycle, I sure would have liked to know what the hell was going on because there were times it sure seemed like my settings caused a system hang on boot. On a couple of occasions, they did, and it took me way too long to recognize it.

 

Back when I was more budget conscious than I am now, I went for the obvious candidate CPUs for big-time overclocking that didn't need to be on premium motherboards (Athlon XP-M 2400+, i5-2500K, i7-2600K). I had to think back to some of my old overclocked builds on a budget to remember what a higher-end board would have gotten me, and it was usually I/O. Not even the generation of technology like PCI-E 4.0 vs. 5.0, but the number of back panel USB ports, USB headers, PCI/PCI-E slots, SATA ports, and even fan headers. And yes, especially in the case of the $80 Albatron Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset Socket A board that I used with the Athlon XP-M, I ran out of I/O a number of times.

 

Fast forward to last year, and 10+ back panel USB ports was one of the earliest requirements I had while board shopping. Every (more) affordable AM5 option fell short in that area.

 

Speaking of PCI-E 5.0, that immediately ruled out the B650 for AM5. Last year, any respectable B650E motherboard started at $300 and X670E at $400. None of the boards I really wanted were part of any Micro Center bundles either, so I ended up going with this sussy baka Asus board, which I wouldn't have bought if I didn't effectively get it for $80. Also, what later turned out to be my ideal $300 B650E board—the ASRock Taichi Lite, the most affordable B650E with a 7-segment display and is otherwise better than this ROG board in every way—didn't come out for another half a year.

 

I generally wouldn't buy a high-end board on a budget, but the issue of cheaper motherboards screwing you on I/O options is very real. That's why I felt comfortable buying a damn Z170 board for the i3-6100 build I did for my parents back in 2016 when by any logical means, I should have gotten an H110 board instead. I just didn't want to deal with the adapters, hubs, and other crap like what I added to their previous nForce 570 Socket AM2 board or my old 8th gen i5 Intel NUC that I gave them to replace the i3-6100.

 

As it's already been said, none of this is necessarily gamer territory either. Gamers migrating from consoles need this stuff the least, and that's the audience you were building PCs for not long ago. I don't consider myself a gamer, my lack of free time to play games since last year notwithstanding. This is more power user, overclocking enthusiast, or some other EHW motto territory.

Edited Sunday at 06:39 by Snakecharmed

[ENTERPRISE]

12 hours ago, The Pook said:

 

 

no onboard 10 GbE = no buy for me, it's 2024 and it should be a requirement on any $300+ board 

 

it's a shame that the boards that have onboard 10 GbE is limited and most (all?) of the AM5/1700 boards with it use the AQC113 NIC which has documented issues 

Yeah.....the AQC**** parts are an issue. I was stung by that this gen. The drivers were causing such high latency that audio was skipping etc. ironically I ended up getting a trusty Intel X540 card and all is well. Mobo vendors really need to use Intel and not AQC or Realtek, one can dream. 

[Sir Beregond]

20 hours ago, UltraMega said:

All good points. Part of the premise though, is if the cost is justifiable. Do you think you can get more performance out of an expensive board vs putting that cost toward better parts elsewhere? That is the real question. Are people over spending on boards to a point of performance detriment vs overall performance on a given budget? 

This was touched on, but I don't think the person putting a system together with a $300-$600 motherboard is also going to be putting in a GTX 1050 and some low end CPU. If they did, then yes, of course they would be better served buying a new CPU and GPU, and they shouldn't have bought an expensive board in the first place.

 

But again this is also the premise of the gamer / casual overclocker. There are definitely different demographics here and how the motherboard plays into their needs is going to vary as a result.

 

• Gamer - Just wants to turn it on and play a game. Likely comes from consoles. Doesn't know anything about hardware, has never messed with a BIOS, and has no desire to. Absolutely this gamer should not bother overspending on a motherboard.
• Gamer / casual overclocker - This is the gamer who also knows enough to tweak the system for decent enough performance gains in gaming and probably will want a board to support what they want to do, but being casual, still probably doesn't need a super expensive board. May want RGB, etc.
• Gamer / enthusiast - This is the type who knows what they are doing with PC hardware, builds a system that makes sense in its config - i.e. a high end system with high end CPU, GPU, etc., mid-range system with good mid-range config, etc. They will want the convenience features, the easy diagnostic features, they want a board that will support memory overclocking and tweaking, they can play with voltages, boosting, etc. They probably want to bench their system in addition to gaming, but they aren't looking to build a test bench. It's still a daily use system, but also might be a system that has multi-use purposes for professional uses in addition to gaming so they might want the better I/O, networking, etc. Here you probably do want a better than average board.
• Enthusiast - Building a system for benching only and wants all the high end features to support that. Wants to be able to easily swap parts, is probably putting it on a bench. Wants support for things like LN2 cooling, etc. They want the super high end boards with the features to support this, 2 DIMM, etc. I mean this would be really what the more expensive motherboards are for.

 

So I guess that goes back to which demographic is the premise of this thread referring to when asking the question. In my opinion there's tons of nuance here. If all you want to do is enable PBO and XMP/EXPO, then sure don't overspend on a board. If you want to actually get into water-cooling and tweaking your CPU, memory, etc. then perhaps a better board is warranted. Want to do more enthusiast grade benching and other things like that? Then yeah go all out. Even if not doing benching but want certain I/O and networking features that the motherboard manufacturers have segmented arbitrarily into higher priced segments? Then yeah gotta pony up.

 

Sadly I think the motherboard makers are all in cahoots for how they segment even convenience features like a  post code display and push button clear CMOS into $300+ motherboards when 10 years ago I could easily get that at the $150 tier. Just another way we are all getting screwed in the PC hardware space in addition to rising GPU pricing, and other shenanigans.

Edited Sunday at 05:56 by Sir Beregond

[The Pook]

8 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Yeah.....the AQC**** parts are an issue. I was stung by that this gen. The drivers were causing such high latency that audio was skipping etc. ironically I ended up getting a trusty Intel X540 card and all is well. Mobo vendors really need to use Intel and not AQC or Realtek, one can dream. 

 

still rocking my trusty X540 too. But PCIe 2.0, a dedicated card, and drawing ~20W kinda sucks

 

AQC113c fixed the latency and disconnect issues but they introduced new issues with link up during POST/reboot/sleep and it's already been discontinued by Marvell 

[UltraMega]

A lot of good points. Most of your guys are not just doing gaming, and obviously there are other features on a mobo you might want. 

 

The way I look at it is like this: anyone buying a gaming PC with a reasonable budget in mind would be wasting money if they spent a lot on the motherboard because there is no performance to be gained from a $300 board vs a $150 board, and that $150 could be used to buy a better GPU/CPU or faster/more ram instead. If the goal is to max out performance on a fixed budget, an expensive motherboard is wasteful. 

 

I also don't ever see anyone consider the cost of cooling with a high TDP CPU vs a low one. 

 

This rant isn't really aimed at the people here so much. Kinda sparked by just browsing other sites online and seeing people post their new gaming PCs with $1500 worth of parts, with half of the cost coming from just the case, motherboard, and the AIO. 

 

 

Just an odd trend I've noticed lately. In the past, if someone not too knowledgeable about PCs was building their first gaming PC, you would expect them not to lean towards top dollar motherboards, but today it seems to be opposite. People who don't know the difference seem to be more likely to buy an expensive board. 

Edited Sunday at 17:10 by UltraMega

[Snakecharmed]

One other thing that I just thought of was that a few years ago, motherboards with insufficient VRMs being paired with the more power hungry CPUs were a big deal, so the general advice to spend more on a board might have been a hedge toward safety.

 

Either way, I don't think suggesting a higher-tier board is necessarily made with performance in mind as much as it may be some other factors to ensure that there won't be any other types of issues with the build. The same thing tends to happen with PSUs and it's why you see some people thinking you always need 1300W now. Sure, if it's a POS that's rated 69 Plus Wood...or a Gigabyte.

Edited Sunday at 18:42 by Snakecharmed

[UltraMega]

9 minutes ago, Snakecharmed said:

One other thing that I just thought of was that a few years ago, motherboards with insufficient VRMs being paired with the more power hungry CPUs were a big deal, so the general advice to spend more on a board might have been a hedge toward safety.

 

Either way, I don't think suggesting a higher-tier board is necessarily made with performance in mind as much as it may be some other factors to ensure that there won't be any other types of issues with the build. The same thing tends to happen with PSUs and it's why you see some people thinking you always need 1300W now. Sure, if it's a POS that's rated 69 Plus Wood...or a Gigabyte.

Yes just to be clear, I'm definitely not suggesting anyone choose a low quality cheap board. Just that there is a point where the quality is good enough, and spending more beyond that (without specific feature in mind that could be relavent to a specific workflow) is wasteful spending. 

[UltraMega]

I was thinking about this some more and I think I actually figured out why this trend is happening. It's because cases have gotten A LOT better, at least aesthetically, in recent years. It used to be that most cases did not have a window, and if it did it was usually foggy plastic that didn't look great anyway. But today, almost all custom cases have a nice-looking glass side panel, and there is a lot more incentive to build a PC that looks nice on the inside.

 

That trend with cases and the incentive to make flashier looking PCs is why so much RGB has popped up (and because it's gotten really easy to manufacture LEDs), and why there are flashier and flashier looking motherboards today. While there are still a lot of really well priced quality boards today, there are a lot more boards designed to look flashy at a glance than there used to be, and this has given motherboard manufactures a reason to shift some of their focus to a higher price point. Not that these boards don't usually also come with other more high-end features, but what you actually gain in terms of actual performance differences today from a middle ground $120-$160 quality board vs a high end ~$300 board is virtually nothing, outside of user specific features like high end networking or USB4. There isn't any tweaking a $300 board can do that a $150 board can't do that will result in a significant enough performance difference to outshine what one could gain in performance from spending $150 more on a CPU or GPU, so it basically just results in worse performance overall on a fixed budget.

 

People today, especially more novice PC buyers, care a lot more about the aesthetics of the PC than they used to, and I notice this trend among novice buyers/builders more than anywhere else. I'm not accusing anyone here of doing this, just pointing out a trend I notice more and more among less informed PC gamers.

Edited yesterday at 01:58 by UltraMega

[damric]

I've never spent that much on a board. Maybe like $170 new at the highest. I got a few nice AM4 boards for that price or less like Taichi and Velocita. It seems like on new platforms even the ASRock boards are kind of high for anything with good VRM now. It's what is keeping me on good old AM4. 

 

 

[Sir Beregond]

5 hours ago, Snakecharmed said:

if it's a POS that's rated 69 Plus Wood...or a Gigabyte.

 

  

4 hours ago, UltraMega said:

I was thinking about this some more and I think I actually figured out why this trend is happening. It's because cases have gotten A LOT better, at least aesthetically, in recent years. It used to be that most cases did not have a window, and if it did it was usually foggy plastic that didn't look great anyway. But today, almost all custom cases have a nice-looking glass side panel, and there is a lot more incentive to build a PC that looks nice on the inside.

 

That trend with cases and the incentive to make flashier looking PCs is why so much RGB has popped up (and because it's gotten really easy to manufacture LEDs), and why there are flashier and flashier looking motherboards today. While there are still a lot of really well priced quality boards today, there are a lot more boards designed to look flashy at a glance than there used to be, and this has given motherboard manufactures a reason to shift some of their focus to a higher price point. Not that these boards don't usually also come with other more high-end features, but what you actually gain in terms of actual performance differences today from a middle ground $120-$160 quality board vs a high end ~$300 board is virtually nothing in terms of performance today, outside of user specific features like high end networking or USB4. There isn't any tweaking a $300 board can do that a $150 board can't do that will result in a significant enough performance difference to outshine what one could gain in performance from spending $150 more on a CPU or GPU, so it basically just results in worse performance overall on a fixed budget.

 

People today, especially more novice PC buyers, care a lot more about the aesthetics of the PC than they used to, and I notice this trend among novice buyers/builders more than anywhere else. I'm not accusing anyone here of doing this, just pointing out a trend I notice more and more among less informed PC gamers.

Yeah this is absolutely part of it...going back to @Fluxmaven talking about aesthetics. It's also why us custom watercoolers are frustrated at a lot of the newbies entering the space because go to r/watercooling and its all about how cool it looks, meanwhile its the most hot boxed, bad performing loop you've ever seen. But that's ok...it "looks cool".

 

Edited yesterday at 00:30 by Sir Beregond

[SoloCamo]

I've pretty much always went with middle of the road boards as long as they had the features I needed and had reliable power delivery/cooling.  There is only one time I spent for a top tier board and that's when I was gifted a FX-9590 and wanted the best board possible for AM3+ to ensure it ran to it's full potential.  Said board was a Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z. 

 

Both my current Z590's are mid range (Asus TUF Z590 and Asrock Steel Legend) and were around $200-$250 new.  This just goes to show much times have changed as my top tier Asus for that AM3+ rig was $225.... now getting a board of similar quality is easily $400-$500.

Edited yesterday at 02:37 by SoloCamo

[Snakecharmed]

This is when I realize I'm grateful for paying no mind to interior aesthetics. It certainly would have added extra expense to my build. If I had an aquarium-style case, you bet I'd feel obligated to make it look good inside too.

 

Instead, my case is to the left of where I'm sitting, placed inside of what would have been an enclosed space in my desk if I didn't open up the back and leave off the front door. My only considerations for running wires/cables are to avoid creating unnecessary airflow obstructions beyond what I can reasonably manage. I have no idea how tedious it is to match PCB colors, ARGB LED lights, and fans while still ensuring that the components are all good quality and perform well.

 

Circling back to the original question, it's likely a combination of factors and it's not universal for everyone who overspends on a motherboard. It's partly:

• Ignorance possibly fueled by bad word-of-mouth or influencer advice (Maybe those bar charts that exaggerate 1% differences aren't that helpful when people ignore the context.)
• The aesthetic tax
• The tendency to overrate your needs in a hobby where there are more product choices than rules

I've seen the specs of a few baffling builds where the user created an easily avoidable bottleneck with their choice of components like an absolutely dreadful SSD on a workstation board. I hesitate to draw a broader conclusion beyond ignorance (some of it willful) when we share a world with Wccftech commenters, the likes of whom have brain-dead pissing matches about why AMD/Intel having the best gaming CPU matters when 1) none of them can afford it, and 2) if you have anything resembling a serious gaming rig, you're going to be GPU-bound anyway.

Edited yesterday at 03:25 by Snakecharmed

[Fluxmaven]

Aside from all the rack mounted stuff, I do have windowed side panels on all my rigs and I keep them up on the desk. Partially because I like looking at them, and also because we have pets so I don't want them on the floor. So a decent looking board is a consideration for sure. I also want plenty of USB ports, M.2 slots, and a post code display so that immediately bumps you into a higher end board these days unfortunately. 

 

On simpler builds I will go with a cheaper board. Although it wasn't that long ago that you really got swindled on the lower end chipsets for basic features. It wasn't until H570 and B560 that you could enable XMP on Intel. Was always funny to see people a couple years back buying fancy RAM kits that were stuck running at 2133 because they didn't get a Z board. Or vice versa, people buying Z board with a locked CPU.  

 

[UltraMega]

2 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Aside from all the rack mounted stuff, I do have windowed side panels on all my rigs and I keep them up on the desk. Partially because I like looking at them, and also because we have pets so I don't want them on the floor. So a decent looking board is a consideration for sure. I also want plenty of USB ports, M.2 slots, and a post code display so that immediately bumps you into a higher end board these days unfortunately. 

 

On simpler builds I will go with a cheaper board. Although it wasn't that long ago that you really got swindled on the lower end chipsets for basic features. It wasn't until H570 and B560 that you could enable XMP on Intel. Was always funny to see people a couple years back buying fancy RAM kits that were stuck running at 2133 because they didn't get a Z board. Or vice versa, people buying Z board with a locked CPU.  

 

Just a quick note, Intel didn't lock ram speeds at all until somewhere around the 7th gen I series, and they didn't lock speeds to 2133, I think it was 2933. 

 

That was what made me switch to AMD though. I had 3200mhz DDR4 ram already paired with an Intel CPU that I wasn't overclocking. No way was I going to be forced to buy a higher tier board just to keep using my ram at the proper speed. 

[neurotix]

Well, I'm the one guilty of 1) buying a high end board and 2) caring about aesthetics and matching RGB (though I generally just set it to a cyan/magenta cycle through the 7 RGB fans and 4 light strips). If you look at my build Ai Crystal and its album.

 

I personally think RGB is cool and it's great that we have low cost RGB fans and light strips because I remember in like 2015 a full RGB Corsair K70 keyboard was like $250 compared to $130 for a solid color one. Times have advanced and now RGB LEDs are cheap and readily available. I think that's a good thing.

 

Regarding cheaper motherboards vs high end ones, I bought a high end CPU so I also bought a board with two 8-pin EPS connectors and something like 20+4(if I recall correctly) phase digital VRM. But I'm a power user and participate in hwbot, and also need something stable. For Joe (lol) Average Gamer playing at say 1440p it makes perfect sense to buy a cheaper board and use the savings for a better GPU. It can still be a flashy, well cable managed tempered glass side panel and RGB fan/light strips rig too. My RGB fans in my build are like $30 for a three pack including a controller box and remote (Anidees AI-AUREOLA v2). My Phanteks RGB 5050 light strips are $20 for 2. So yes there is some cost for the bling, and depending on budget that might be doable or worth it for the builder, or you can save $50 to put towards better memory or something.

 

You are absolutely right though; I'm pushing my chip and memory to its limit, so I kind of need the high end VRM. The average gamer doesn't need my board. Get a $150 one instead of mine ($450).

 

I don't think mine has USB4 but it does support PCIE Gen 5 and I have a Gen 5 NVME in my system currently.

 

High end boards are also better for memory overclocking, which I've done a lot of.

[Fluxmaven]

33 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

Just a quick note, Intel didn't lock ram speeds at all until somewhere around the 7th gen I series, and they didn't lock speeds to 2133, I think it was 2933. 

 

That was what made me switch to AMD though. I had 3200mhz DDR4 ram already paired with an Intel CPU that I wasn't overclocking. No way was I going to be forced to buy a higher tier board just to keep using my ram at the proper speed. 

It was Skylake (6th gen) and it was 2133 on B150. B250 moved the needle to 2400. B360 was 2666. B460 gave us 2666 for i5 and below and 2933 for i7 and above. 

 

During that entire time, Ryzen was here with higher core counts and support for faster memory. Early Ryzen's had a hard time running RAM higher than 3000, but at least it wasn't locked away. 

[UltraMega]

1 hour ago, neurotix said:

Well, I'm the one guilty of 1) buying a high end board and 2) caring about aesthetics and matching RGB (though I generally just set it to a cyan/magenta cycle through the 7 RGB fans and 4 light strips). If you look at my build Ai Crystal and its album.

 

I personally think RGB is cool and it's great that we have low cost RGB fans and light strips because I remember in like 2015 a full RGB Corsair K70 keyboard was like $250 compared to $130 for a solid color one. Times have advanced and now RGB LEDs are cheap and readily available. I think that's a good thing.

 

Regarding cheaper motherboards vs high end ones, I bought a high end CPU so I also bought a board with two 8-pin EPS connectors and something like 20+4(if I recall correctly) phase digital VRM. But I'm a power user and participate in hwbot, and also need something stable. For Joe (lol) Average Gamer playing at say 1440p it makes perfect sense to buy a cheaper board and use the savings for a better GPU. It can still be a flashy, well cable managed tempered glass side panel and RGB fan/light strips rig too. My RGB fans in my build are like $30 for a three pack including a controller box and remote (Anidees AI-AUREOLA v2). My Phanteks RGB 5050 light strips are $20 for 2. So yes there is some cost for the bling, and depending on budget that might be doable or worth it for the builder, or you can save $50 to put towards better memory or something.

 

You are absolutely right though; I'm pushing my chip and memory to its limit, so I kind of need the high end VRM. The average gamer doesn't need my board. Get a $150 one instead of mine ($450).

 

I don't think mine has USB4 but it does support PCIE Gen 5 and I have a Gen 5 NVME in my system currently.

 

High end boards are also better for memory overclocking, which I've done a lot of.

 

You have a cutting edge high end PC to the point that the only way to gain more performance is by tweaking. If you didn't have a 7000X3D chip and a 4090 already, then maybe it would be wasteful to spend a lot on a board if you could have otherwise got a better CPU or GPU, but you're not in that boat. 

 

It's totally valid to want the PC to look nice with RGB and all that as well. I like the look of that kind of stuff for the most part as well, I just wouldn't spend a lot towards that specifically myself. 

 

Sometimes in other places like on Imgur I see people post their newly built PC, and it will have $300-$500 or the budget going to things that don't affect performance while having like a 4070 or something around there and I just think to myself, they could have gotten a 4080 if they hadn't put so much towards a motherboard, frilly case, and huge AIO. That's the kind of scenarios I see that made me think about this whole topic.