Unhinged Rant About Motherboards

[Music] this video doesn't have much structure it's mostly just an unhinged chaotic rant about motherboards because there weren't any clouds for me to yell at today so that'll make it more fun because it's largely stream of conscious but at the same time don't come here expecting some in-depth objective review of motherboards because that's not what this is this is just getting some frustrations out there so okay with the expectations set we recently had to go shopping for a motherboard for one of our task benches we always want to have a basic debug functionality for benches because regularly working on your computer means you're going to regularly run into boot problems you should want that too because it makes the build easier it used to be that these debug functions were widely available on 140 motherboards but these days motherboard manufacturers have shifted all of the actually useful features for PC Builders to motherboards that are like 500 plus dollars it's gotten completely insane I was talking to some other board manufacturers recently when I was in Taiwan and the general gist from the engineers in the industry was also it's gonna keep being this way until someone complains about it and we can use that as ammunition to say hey people want useful debug features for PC DIY build in to make it easier can we please add them back in so this is the video this video is brought to you by us and our debug coaster packs currently 10 off with the code but why at checkout our debug coaster packs feature a seven segment debug display because someone has to set an example apparently and it's going to be us each pack comes with four distinct soft coasters that are easy to wash and support your drinks while displaying awesome PC Enthusiast designs like a motherboard with a debug display and a two scale socket there are also RAM sticks with detail all the way down to the tiny lock pinhole at the bottom and a GM logo with a detailed height gradient there's also an SSD with the Flash and the controller all laid out use code but why for 10 off the coasters at checkout on store.gamersnexis.net while it's active to support our unhinged rants while getting something great in return anyway the insane thing is that features that make it easier for a user to self troubleshoot a problem also reduce the cost to the company because it reduces calls to the call center the support center assuming they are actually going to fulfill their support obligations which most of them basically say you figure it out yourself so maybe it won't reduce the cost there but if they actually support their boards it would so that'd be nice the companies are so busy shoving LEDs on everything 100 amp power stages gimmicks to make it easier to Dismount a video card the one time you do it that they've forgotten about beginner builders in general but even Advanced users maybe especially want these features and it's not just debug displays stuff like being able to hit XMP with your RAM also very important it also kind of lacking on boards that are in like the 200 to 300 price range which is kind of insane a lot of the time uh maybe some exceptions for AMD and I was standing because just generally lower targets with the CPU in general but a lot of this video it's sort of been precluded here with a back in my day argument but back in my day we had overheating vrms and we've well we didn't like it but we did have useful features like debugging alongside it and there were a lot fewer LEDs and a lot fewer stupid features we're going to talk about some of those today too so anyway let's get started with the rat okay we're making this video for two reasons Patrick and I were shopping for new parts for test benches like this part that we ended up buying and we became extremely annoyed when trying to find a board with a seven segment display and also one with reliable ability to hit XMP targets the seventh segment though is the one we're focusing on here today which for a lot of people you're gonna watch this and be like wow this guy really cares about seven segment displays I'm not sure I care that much well uh you're right I do care a lot about seven segment displays because a lot of our daily jobs here is trying to get stuff to boot when it's just not working right because when you work with as many parts we do especially when they're pre-launched that's a condition you run into and it's a feature you need and you start to understand with time this is a luxury I would be willing to pay a few extra dollars for but not 500. that's where it gets crazy so anyway this board is 500 and uh it's only a little bit more expensive than the average cost of a motherboard in this class like z790 with a seven segment display that's the crazy part we didn't go that much above the only reason we spent this much for a test board is because of that feature there's a little more too we could have gone with like Max on for a little bit cheaper but we needed something that would be more reliable so am5 is in largely the same boat actually it's more so than Z sub 90 where if you look at am5 boards on NewEgg they're all as you all know very expensive offensive still if you're in the x670 class or even the B series and to get a seven segment is even more expensive so the point is that it's gotten too crazy and consumers are going to be gas lit by these prices because of inflation or whatever other excuse manufacturers want to use and while yes that is actually a thing of course obviously uh the price of a seven segment display hasn't been inflated by hundreds of dollars that's not how that works it's not it's not like eggs so uh that that comment like eggs will age poorly once the price is normalized but for those watching today when I guess you're all watching today the second reason we filmed this video is because over the last year or so a lot of our contacts in the industry from motherboard companies have told us behind the scenes not through PR channels that they wanted to see a video like this where we've talked about this in the past but a lot of times engineers and product managers people who are really Hands-On with this stuff at the PMS especially who actually know the boards and use them they have trouble fighting with sales and marketing and our understanding of the way the industry works and probably most of them is that sales always wins and what sells right now is not a debug display but if there's enough pressure and interest from the consumers and if media can help spur that interest like we did with we being media not just GN media in general spurred interest and higher quality vrm several years ago and it finally got into the gigabytes board for example if there's enough interest sales will eventually go oh okay maybe our Engineers aren't idiots and they actually know what they're talking about even though our job is just to sell the board and their job is to engineer the board and know what they're talking about but you have to kind of create that respect externally sometimes and they need ammunition internally to make their argument because saying trust me I'm an engineer doesn't work when you're fighting with someone whose job is to just sell the product and they see LEDs sell not whatever this thing with seven segments is my favorite quote from one of the contacts we talked to was malicious segmentation we're going to get into some of the quotes later in this video but he was basically referring to it as an act of trying to create if you're familiar with the concept of product segmentation a hierarchy or a Tyrion where there are clear divisions why you would step up an extra couple hundred dollars and seven segments sadly has become one of those features where it is being clearly segmented despite being generally a pretty low-cost part to add let's start with some inarguable data and then we'll kind of rant from there we'll focus on the seven segment display first and foremost right now at the time of filming we did some quick crawling around at retailers and we learned this of the current state of motherboards so we first checked out some older boards back in the p550 era am4's cheapest motherboard with a seven segment display historically glancing at PC part picker data was 140 to 150 dollars the not on sale prices were around 180 that was reasonable the 180 is getting up there a bit but we'll see that much of the argument of just board costs it's going up in general and to be fair uh at that price point you really need to just have basic functionality of the board can handle a CPU of a higher class with a better vrm before the seven segments so that seems fine but now a quick glance reveals some of the cheapest b650e am5 boards are 350 dollars for a simple sub attack but display which is actually completely insane and then Intel is pretty bad too back on z490 you could have gotten a phantom gaming velocity for 260 MSRP to get one of those debug codes kind of high but at least that's still in a Range where a normal person might have a shot at getting one today with c790 it's 450 on sale for an MSI board with a seven segment display or four 180 for an ASRock Port if you want to you can buy this inevitable bios nightmare from Maxon for 270 bucks instead and that's sort of the problem the big brands have abandoned this part of the market but Brands like Maxon which it's not particularly well known and it's not even particularly good to score in general with our experiences with some other boards they show at very least they prove that it is possible to still get basic debug features on boards that are considered to be sort of in air quotes cheaper cheaper than 350 400 at least so it's not like having one of these things magically makes the board 450 and the cheaper brands that are kind of in the no-name territory in the Western Market at least are showing that to be true now sometimes you get things like those annoying little debug LEDs that you can barely see when it's actually inside of your case with other LEDs and you have to sort of like move your hand in weird ways to cover the spilling of the light to read what the code says and that's okay it's on the cheaper board depending on the implementation it can work well as a supplement but it never has the same level of detail the problem is that they limit you to error read out of basically Ram CPU or GPU and it almost universally just says Ram uh and it might lead you down the wrong path when it's something else that a debug display with the actual error code would tell you more information on and if you're fancy of course you could even hook up a post buzzer to get a proper post beep but no we can't just include the post speakers with motherboards anymore because that costs too much also we need to keep including SATA cables and random accessory PCI add-in cards instead let's look at some examples of what you get instead of quality of life features that make building easier and more fun this is the 380 Asus strix z790a gaming which on its own web page claims that it is a DIY friendly design whatever that means sort of like saying this game is player friendly it's really sort of the base requirement but don't worry Asus is spending money in all the right places instead of a DIY friendly debug code for their DIY friendly design they spend your money on painting a pixel art Rog logo on the back of the board plus some kind of DNA double helix pixel art on the back great use of money Asus we can't wait to never see it Asus says that the strix z790a quote both the Embraces the light for an alternate take on build themes to its dark and brooding brother the z790f they say the quote whole design is tied together with Rog Centric detailing on the board heatsinks and I O shield for a vibrant and futuristic Outlook so they're going full yesden and building origin stories for their motherboards sort of like how this is my origin story for becoming like a super villain because that's how much I personally care about this specific issue the focus on branding over function is exactly what height is doing and it's not a good move Apple gets away with it because they've indoctrinated their core audience with a cult of Steve Jobs and building a future of that jobs and dystopia we've talked about but Asus isn't at Apple's level they can't do this they have to provide some base functionality but it doesn't stop there Asus installs a massive LED with what they call gaming immersion or a lighting you also get Armory crate Asus is malware-like board level functional root kit that attaches itself to your OS so that from the board even if you've never connected to the internet it can start installing asus's bloat and uh they try to masquerade it as a useful driver installing feature but in the future it's just going to be a zero day exploit waiting to happen that no one will find in advance because project zero is working on other things like exynos modems we've been annoyed with that feature for years at the this point I have complained about it in the past but it's only gotten more invasive with time and frustratingly it's one of the things that we've seen advertised on a lot of boards that are lacking more basic functionality again like reliably hitting XMP or debug displays but uh either way that's sort of it's just it's a massive attack Vector waiting to happen but they're happy to Market it that's a separate topic so maybe we'll come back to that one later anyway separate rant entirely for that the rest of the money for this expensive motherboard is spent on Aesthetics the word Rog has literally repeated so many times that we became semantically satiated r-o-g-r-o-g-r-o-g labeling on the i o cover under the strix LED panel a company in the Rog Rog Ro d r o d r o d r o d r o d m that two spreader labeling like across the entire m.2 heat spreader the slot above the reinforced quick releasable pcie slots as a Gamers and big letters we also get a nice and teenage angsty for those who dare branding on the lower m.2 slot because the most daring thing in the world is apparently building a PC with this motherboard and finally from the Asus Edge Lord brand we have one more board they show that AMD gets just as much as Intel the x670ef gaming Wi-Fi costs 450 MSRP and features more for those who dare branded whatever that means with a nice font switch to a very assassin's creed-esque Republic of gamers in a classy italic next to an Rog logo and if you missed it a giant LED plate that once again says Rog Ro g r o g r o g r o g r o g add infinitum the board then reminds us game first work second what are we even doing anymore who wrote that I I like what contribution does that make to the product it's so stupid I I just can we do stuff that's useful please or at least if we're gonna do text on the board make it interesting or helpful like maybe the name of the board or what that slot is or at least something that's less cringe-worthy to put on it for an adult to own anyway that's on top of the m.2 slot and then the lower m.2 slot tells us for those who Dare for those who Dare for those who Dare for those who dare it's like they've taken the intentional and meaningful and impactful repetition of Rage Against the Machine lyrics and then they applied it to what some executive thinks Gamers like the rest of the board honestly is relatively featureless they run Mega Overkill 90 AMP power stages on a 16 plus 2 design and a massive amount of i o and that's the best part of the board there are real features like the insane amount of IO m.2 support and otherwise but they just dropped the ball on some Basics this is the MSI MPG MPG stands for MSI performance gaming and MSI stands for microstar international so it's the microstar International microstar International performance gaming d790 Edge now that might mislead you to thinking that they spent most of their money on this board on the ink to print all those letters to put on the box but moving on you get these features an RGB LED dragon logo a large block of aluminum with actually low surface area because MSI thinks it's ugly to fit a heat sink and make it more useful with less metal a big block of metal as an i o cover to hide an area of the board that MSI thinks is unsightly and to hold the integrated i o Shield which can be held in a much cheaper way there's a pcie slot with reinforcement which is really only useful to pre-built manufacturers and then there's a bunch of cable stickers and here's the ASRock board we chose you might be looking at this 300 motherboard and wondering where all the features are that make it worth 300 but they're there you just can't see them it's because the camouflage is working so well as for why motherboards have gotten more expensive this is the like kind of useful part of the video beyond the unhinged rant where people are like wow he's really losing it or is extremely passionate about this problem to which I say yes the main excuse that they have or that they lean on is is that pcie Gen 5 and ddr5 signaling has gotten more expensive gone are the days of basically a four layer PCB for a motherboard where you could kind of skate by if the user is putting a low end CPU in it they're all six layers they have more expensive signaling costs genuinely however they're also pumping boards with Overkill vrm and vrms in a lot of cases which is interesting because not too many years ago it was the opposite where it's like that was the last of anyone's concerns at these companies and now they've gone kind of the opposite way they're of course still very bad Boards out there with terrible vrms that overheat but they're a lot less frequent and prevalent than they were probably five six years ago so we talked off record some other board engineers and partners and asked why is it going this way where we're really starting to sacrifice a lot of Base function beyond the electrical function so there's still signaling there's still good vrms and that's there on a lot of these boards or all the expensive ones for the most part but we're sacrificing other quality of life and ease of installation features for things that are just kind of stupid and when we talk to some of them well here's a few quotes obviously all anonymized because but because it's bad to say the stuff for them but uh hopefully they can use this as ammunition internally and send the link around which is normally what happens with these videos all right first one is kind of fun this quote says it's becoming malicious product segmentation to force users to spend another 100 to get a bunch of features they don't want and a postcode and that was from a motherboard engineer the next one is from another motherboard engineer this one says I tried to tell the PM these features should be on the 200 or 250 one but they want the margin one dollar five cents 80 cents two dollars every time we do this the profit is better and the next quote I actually really liked and felt sort of a connection to because this is from a CPU manufacturer contact off record of course and they said quote if we can't have nice things anymore because everyone is racing to zero why not innovate can you just give me a header and sell me a separate LED and I plug it in and that is an awesome perspective because it gets to the base of what's going on here which is there is opportunity for a motherboard vendor somewhere to go what if we invent like a new thing okay so we're not going to include feature X or feature y on boards that are less than 300 what if we sell the debug code for 15 bucks and you just socketed onto some header that costs us basically nothing maybe the header even doubles as a jumper for something else so assuming it's simple enough to wire so there is opportunity here and it allows the user to still give them money with crazy markup but uh not have to choose between expensive board with a bunch of they don't want and a board that just doesn't have the features they want at all with like a hundred dollar golf in between them minimally and maybe that's counter to selling the higher end boards but there's opportunity for a manufacturer who's hungry for it and the rest of that quote from the CPU contact was quote debug LEDs have a limit volume discount where in some ways they're more of a fixed cost whereas mosfets and capacitors get major volume discounts management is chasing margin not useful features and that starts to explain why we can bloat vrms sometimes for the segment that the board is in to a place of Comedy that's not to just like this high on vrms it's important it's something we pushed for for a long time as well we finally got it but not every board has to support every CPU and as long as that's clear in the language that's fine uh so it just needs to be this is the biggest thing we've always pushed is in the marketing it needs to be really clear this board is built for x and maybe it doesn't work well with the 7950x when it's overclocked or the 3900k or whatever but as long as it's clear what it does work well with that's okay and maybe you get some features you care more about for that class instead trying to just shove everything uh for the highest ncpus into boards that probably should be more for the mid-range it's chasing the GPU Market model where it's like the low end let's just push people into the the most extreme end of their budget and make them as uncomfortable financially as possible buying and building a computer to extract margin and it just hurts the industry long term anyway consider this a completely unhinged rant kind of for fun kind of just this is like old school GN of let's just get this off our chests here and move on uh knowing that at least we shouted at some clouds uh and maybe the clouds hurt us that's all I really have to say about this I don't know it's we're it's an unhinged outcry for attention to an esoteric issue that we believe deeply in that's kind of the best summary I have for you and it'll benefit new system Builders to bring back down a classic 200 feature to a lower price point even if it's some like separately sold Asus hey buy our 15 accessory that costs us maybe a dollar to make and package and plug it into this pin on the motherboard and now we get infinity margin on a small product that we can attach to motherboards if they're unwilling to buy the more expensive boards so there's opportunity here and it'd be cool if someone would actually try and seize that but especially with how finicky ddr5 is to nail timings right now hit XMP targets uh and the usefulness of a seven segment display for that specific problem as opposed to some debug alley that just says RAM and you don't know why this is this it's not just some OC thing it's not like we're overclocking with like with nitrogen and this is useful this is useful for everybody and especially someone who is having trouble with they turn on XMP and it doesn't Boot and they don't know why and debugged LEDs don't really tell you the detail but a seven segment might so it just depends on how tuned they make them anyway that's it for this one thanks for watching uh go to store.careersaccess.net and use code but why for 10 off the coaster packs while the code is active subscribe for more we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 566,336

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, RANT, motherboard rant, expensive motherboards, best motherboards 2023, motherboard comparison, z790 vs x670, motherboard debug display, motherboard 7 segment display

Id: bEjH775UeNg

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/IceBeam92]

For those who dare , well it seems Steve from Gamersnexus dares!

Joking aside, I agree that those error codes are much more useful than anything else for a motherboard, because guess what if you can’t get your expensive computer to boot, none of these extra features do anything!

Also imagine, most of us in real world , aren’t tech media or a computer repair shop where lots of backup components are just lying around.

[u/marlex]

Yeah it's ridiculous. I'm currently using a system with an old MSI Z97 Gaming 5 that I paid around 130€ for in 2014. I've been thinking of upgrading to AM5 soon and was looking for MBs that have at minimum feature parity with my old one, which you guessed it, would mean a Debug LED. The cheapest one that I could find in my area was the GIGABYTE B650e Aorus Master for 420€.

[u/Mudkipmaster478]

That part just ranting about ROG and their dumb slogan is the hardest ive laughed in awhile. Maybe my sense of humor is screwed, i dunno

[u/Okuriashey]

Why allocate resources into debug LEDs when you can print cringe all over instead

[u/candre23]

Steve ain't wrong. There are a number of features that manufacturers consider "high end" and only put on their expensive boards, despite costing little or nothing to implement. Visible error codes are big on the list. USB flashback and UEFI/BIOS updating without CPU/RAM is another. And don't even get me started about the super convenient removable front panel headers that were all the rage for a minute before MB makers mysteriously decided "nah, never mind".

I swear, the first MB manufacturer that hires somebody who's actually built a PC at some point in their life to sanity check their featuresets is going to corner the fucking market.

[u/seatux]

At least you get LEDs that mean something.

Most motherboards just have cryptic LEDs that could mean anything or nothing at all apart from adding a beeper to the speaker header. Sure the machine boots with a beep, but you know right away there is a problem when it doesn't do that and beeps mean different things.

[u/Kougar]

It's amazing how so many companies can exist and profitably sell product in spite of their own marketing departments best efforts to the contrary. If the four motherboard vendors really think a debug readout is too much I'm sure they could save a fortune by downsizing that marketing department budget instead.

[u/RichardG867]

Standalone debug cards used to be a thing back in the PCI and ISA days; you can still get them, but they won't work on modern boards, even ones with a PCI slot. Since debug codes (bytes written to port 80h) go out the LPC or eSPI bus shared by the I/O chip and TPM, nothing would stop someone from making a modern debug card that just plugs into the TPM connector.

[u/MangoAtrocity]

I can’t stand the LED system on my $300 Z790 board. My $150 Z87 board had a 7-segment code display. Why did they ditch them?