motherboards Is motherboard technology up to date?

[VivyScarlett]

Hi, Just here to get some feedback and possibly a discussion going as to where motherboard technology is currently compared to technology in general.

 

Fair Warning, I am looking more at the extreme side of PC technology. This may come off to most as a rant. A lot of these may also be niche in terms of how many would use these features. 

 

• To start off, The Macbook with USB-C came out two years ago in 2015. Since then we have seen laptops with more and more USB-C. We have also seen Phones with USB-C and other devices such as Monitors. USB-C is also an interface for Thunderbolt 3 technology that allows for 40Gbps, Dual 4k Displays at 60Hz and 100w Charging. This would be tremendously useful on motherboards, and I don't just mean on the back IO. With more and more devices like phones switching to USB-C, it would be very useful to have USB-C Front header connectors that case manufacturers could take advantage of. I'd also like to see Thunderbold 3 USB-C / More USB-C on the back for use with External Storage and Monitors.

• Another issue I see (on gaming motherboards) is not enough attention to Audio. 7.1 surround? Congrats, your still not there yet. I'd like to see more work put into quality audio interfaces. Especially since enthusiasts see graphics as a reason to spend upwards of $1,000 or more. Not to mention but I would highly appreciate having 2 HD_Audio Headers on the motherboard (if possible). 
• 10G Lan ports? Where are they? If I am paying 200+ dollars for a motherboard, then I would love to see a 10G Lan port, and not just on Workstation based boards. Even better would be 2 10G Lan Ports with Teaming Functionality. 
• I'd like to see more Motherboards with built in WIFI and Bluetooth. This may come off an unnecessary but a lot of people still use wifi over lan due to being able to put your Pc in multiple rooms of the house. Having to buy an extra adapter for Bluetooth devices seems outdated. being able to connect your phone, speaker, or headset to your PC via Bluetooth is a really under-appreciated feature. With Bluetooth 5.0 coming out I hope to see more connectivity to the PC.
• Vanity plates. These allow for customization with 3D Printers. Because being able to put your logo on the motherboard just makes it that much cooler. MSI has added these recently.
• More Intel Optane compatibility. (This is new so I don't expect too much of this yet)
• 2 or more USB 3.0 Headers and 3 or more USB 2.0 Headers. (I know that sounds ridiculous but having the option helps a lot.
• Powered USB Ports for Charging.

Feel Free to comment other feature you may have that you would like to see/see more of. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 minutes ago, Alex Thurman said:

having 2 HD_Audio Headers on the motherboard (if possible). 

how would this help?

 

What interfaces do you want?

 

If your doing crazy audio setups, Just get something like a usb mixer, then you get normally a much better dac and things like trx and xlr outs.

 

9 minutes ago, Alex Thurman said:

10G Lan ports? Where are they? If I am paying 200+ dollars for a motherboard, then I would love to see a 10G Lan port,

Thing is, these chips cost about 20-40 bucks now and thats for the cheap ones. The good intel ones are much more. You won't see 10gbe common until intel and amd put it on their cpus/chipsets and for most users this is useless.

 

10 minutes ago, Alex Thurman said:

More Intel Optane compatibility. (This is new so I don't expect too much of this yet)

Well optane is a pcie device and works with any system that has pcie storage support.

 

If you want the normally bad intel caching tech, you need their chipsets, nothing they can do.

 

 

 

Most of these things are what the pcie slots are for, and many of these things are also limted by what intel whats on their chipset. Once intel adds wifi to their chipset(i think in the next gen) we will see it built into many more boards.

[themctipers]

Apple did it because that's what Tom crock wanted the future to be, full of money! Knowing that USB C isn't a thing most people have, they decided to slap it onto their MacBook Pro, one of their best selling computers and then sell dongles along to make profits! This also meant that Apple is taking a hit, but Apple is large enough to take that hit. Now that everyone knows what USB C is, more products will use it and it'll slowly be less of a niche thing and be more of a 'wait YOU don't use USB c?! Fucking caveman'

 

nicer audio would be nice but most built in motherboard audio is good enough. If it's not then the 2 dozen people will go out and buy a DAC. Nothing is better than isolating your audio components by not having it be near all the electrical interference. 

 

10G Ethernet is expensive and not a lot of people have it. That's why it's not there. Not unless 10G internet suddenly becomes pennies/ft and Comcast decides that their slowest plan is 1Gb/s

 

id love to see motherboards with wifi and Bluetooth. 

 

Vanity plates will almost always be a niche thing and I think they should be an option however on their midranged to higher end consumer motherboard models. 

 

Optane is stupid for customers. 

 

Usb 3 headers would be added if there were more things that used USB 3 headers other than your case. Haven't seen a standalone add extra USB 3 ports that used that header.  I have 6 USB 2 headers on my motherboard for 12 more USB 2 ports ..

 

Even my Z77 motherboard has 'USB 3 charging', but not many people actually charge with their computers.  Only for syncing. And if they did, they'd have to license quick charge from Qualcomm. 

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

11 minutes ago, Alex Thurman said:

Not to mention but I would highly appreciate having 2 HD_Audio Headers on the motherboard (if possible). 

[cpuwaiy]

Don't go crazy this generation.  PCI-E 4.0 is around the corner.

[VivyScarlett]

2 minutes ago, themctipers said:

Apple did it because that's what Tom crock wanted the future to be, full of money! Knowing that USB C isn't a thing most people have, they decided to slap it onto their MacBook Pro, one of their best selling computers and then sell dongles along to make profits! This also meant that Apple is taking a hit, but Apple is large enough to take that hit. Now that everyone knows what USB C is, more products will use it and it'll slowly be less of a niche thing and be more of a 'wait YOU don't use USB c?! Fucking caveman'

 

nicer audio would be nice but most built in motherboard audio is good enough. If it's not then the 2 dozen people will go out and buy a DAC. Nothing is better than isolating your audio components by not having it be near all the electrical interference. 

 

10G Ethernet is expensive and not a lot of people have it. That's why it's not there. Not unless 10G internet suddenly becomes pennies/ft and Comcast decides that their slowest plan is 1Gb/s

 

id love to see motherboards with wifi and Bluetooth. 

 

Vanity plates will almost always be a niche thing and I think they should be an option however on their midranged to higher end consumer motherboard models. 

 

Optane is stupid for customers. 

 

Usb 3 headers would be added if there were more things that used USB 3 headers other than your case. Haven't seen a standalone add extra USB 3 ports that used that header.  I have 6 USB 2 headers on my motherboard for 12 more USB 2 ports ..

 

Even my Z77 motherboard has 'USB 3 charging', but not many people actually charge with their computers.  Only for syncing. And if they did, they'd have to license quick charge from Qualcomm. 

 

 

Before I get more comments, I'd like to point out that in the beginning of my post I pointed out that this was based more towards the extreme side of PC technology. When I added Optane and wifi/bluetooth, I was basing it more towards the mid to low end of motherboards. The vanity plats may be niche but having the option on higher end boards would be very much appreciated.  

[themctipers]

Just now, Alex Thurman said:

Before I get more comments, I'd like to point out that in the beginning of my post I pointed out that this was based more towards the extreme side of PC technology. When I added Optane and wifi/bluetooth, I was basing it more towards the mid to low end of motherboards. The vanity plats may be niche but having the option on higher end boards would be very much appreciated.  

Isn't optane $35/$55 for 16/32g of cache? That's pretty useless, just buy a 128gb SSD for $70.. 

 

i want wifi and Bluetooth to be a standard feature on motherboards that are of the higher end H and Z variety (not on B, on something like H270 and Z270)

[VivyScarlett]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Thing is, these chips cost about 20-40 bucks now and thats for the cheap ones. The good intel ones are much more. You won't see 10gbe common until intel and amd put it on their cpus/chipsets and for most users this is useless.

This is based more towards the extreme side of tech, i.e: gaming boards. If I am paying a few hundred dollars on a board, there should be an option for this weather the board be 200 or 500, I don't mind, as long as it starts to show up / show up more than it already has.

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Alex Thurman said:

This is based more towards the extreme side of tech, i.e: gaming boards. 

In what way does a gaming oriented product have it's gaming functions benefit from a 10GbE connection?

[VivyScarlett]

2 minutes ago, themctipers said:

Isn't optane $35/$55 for 16/32g of cache? That's pretty useless, just buy a 128gb SSD for $70.. 

 

i want wifi and Bluetooth to be a standard feature on motherboards that are of the higher end H and Z variety (not on B, on something like H270 and Z270)

It can be either cache or high speed storage, and this does include the ability for larger Optane modules in the future as said in LTT videos. Unless you want to be using a ramdisk on a 4gb of ram PC. Be my guest but I can't imagine it being a fun experience.

[VivyScarlett]

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

In what way does a gaming oriented product have it's gaming functions benefit from a 10GbE connection?

With solutions like Steam link, Nvidia Game Streaming and other alternatives including a possible NAS, it's beneficial to have a 10G Lan connection. I am not just tailoring this to internet only as local network connections are also important to many people.

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Alex Thurman said:

With solutions like Steam link, Nvidia Game Streaming and other alternatives including a possible NAS, it's beneficial to have a 10G Lan connection. I am not just tailoring this to internet only as local network connections are also important to many people.

Steam Link and nVidia Game Streaming would not benefit from a 10GbE connection.  Firstly, because relatively speaking, those services do not use a significant amount of the bandwidth available in a 1GbE connection.  Gamestreaming caps at a mere 80mbits when doing 4K streaming that is less than 10% of a 1GbE connection. The Steam In Home Streaming is around 50mbps or 5%.  Secondly, you'd need a client that supports 10GbE.  Even the nVidia Shield Android TV only has a 1GbE network adapter and the Steam Link device only has, no joke, a 100MbE network adpater.  That connection will run as fast as it's slowest link.  10GbE won't do anything there.

 

As for a NAS, I can't really imagine any gaming scenarios that create a pressing need for 10GbE services.  I suppose an extreme minority may want to run all of their games off a NAS instead of off local storage but that's just people trying to make things massively more complicated, expensive, and error/fault prone than simply using a local SSD

[VivyScarlett]

Just now, AshleyAshes said:

Steam Link and nVidia Game Streaming would not benefit from a 10GbE connection.  Firstly, because relatively speaking, those services do not use a significant amount of the bandwidth available in a 1GbE connection.  Gamestreaming caps at a mere 80mbits when doing 4K streaming that is less than 10% of a 1GbE connection. The Steam In Home Streaming is around 50mbps or 5%.  Secondly, you'd need a client that supports 10GbE.  Even the nVidia Shield Android TV only has a 1GbE network adapter and the Steam Link device only has, no joke, a 100MbE network adpater.  That connection will run as fast as it's slowest link.  10GbE won't do anything there.

 

As for a NAS, I can't really imagine any gaming scenarios that create a pressing need for 10GbE services.  I suppose an extreme minority may want to run all of their games off a NAS instead of off local storage but that's just people trying to make things massively more complicated, expensive, and error/fault prone than simply using a local SSD

Please keep in mind that when your dealing with a family of 4 or more, bandwidth gets taken up really fast. weather it be local connections to a NAS or outbound connections to the internet. Sure, you can put a limit on people but then they get cranky and mad because of slow connections. 

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Alex Thurman said:

Please keep in mind that when your dealing with a family of 4 or more, bandwidth gets taken up really fast. weather it be local connections to a NAS or outbound connections to the internet. Sure, you can put a limit on people but then they get cranky and mad because of slow connections. 

Excuse me, I'm just going to bring up an image from another thread where someone said something similar, and I then demonstrated my 1GbE NAS serving up ten concurrent 1080p video streams at once.  Now, this was about concurrent reads off a single hard drive so these screen shots focus on the drive being read and not the network adapter.  However, as you can see the drive's read speed is still only 30MB/s or 240mbps, which you can safely determine is also what the network load was.

 

 

And more over, and this is key, even if we were talking about massive, MASSIVE streams (And a BluRay's MAX bitrate for the entire disc is only 54mbps, and UHD BD's are 128mbps) going to 10-30 users, you would need a NAS and network switch infrastructure capable of 10GbE, but each individual client would still be fine with 1GbE.  Since a gaming PC would be a CLIENT and not a NAS, 10GbE would solve non problems for the gaming PC.  More over, we had to scale your scenario from 'Family Of Four' to 'A Small Hotel' to even create a situation where a 10GbE backend would be justified.

[VivyScarlett]

12 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Excuse me, I'm just going to bring up an image from another thread where someone said something similar, and I then demonstrated my 1GbE NAS serving up ten concurrent 1080p video streams at once.  Now, this was about concurrent reads off a single hard drive so these screen shots focus on the drive being read and not the network adapter.  However, as you can see the drive's read speed is still only 30MB/s or 240mbps, which you can safely determine is also what the network load was.

 

 

And more over, and this is key, even if we were talking about massive, MASSIVE streams (And a BluRay's MAX bitrate for the entire disc is only 54mbps, and UHD BD's are 128mbps) going to 10-30 users, you would need a NAS and network switch infrastructure capable of 10GbE, but each individual client would still be fine with 1GbE.  Since a gaming PC would be a CLIENT and not a NAS, 10GbE would solve non problems for the gaming PC.  More over, we had to scale your scenario from 'Family Of Four' to 'A Small Hotel' to even create a situation where a 10GbE backend would be justified.

If that was the case then I would ask the reason as to this video: 

It's not just this video but a vast number of people who want faster internal networking. I haven't had much luck with PCIE Networking cards. I am also a content creator and as such would like nothing better than to not worry about transfer speeds and compatibility issues. This isn't just for gaming, it's based towards all enthusiasts.

[AshleyAshes]

8 hours ago, Alex Thurman said:

If that was the case then I would ask the reason as to this video: 

It's not just this video but a vast number of people who want faster internal networking. I haven't had much luck with PCIE Networking cards. I am also a content creator and as such would like nothing better than to not worry about transfer speeds and compatibility issues. This isn't just for gaming, it's based towards all enthusiasts.

To be frank, if content creation that you were doing was being bottlenecked by your 1GbE network you'd have mentioned it first.  This is you trying to reach futher to justify it because you decided you needed it before you had a reason to need it.  And once we get out of gaming and into content creation we are no longer talking about gaming products, are we?  If you want to give workstation grade capabilities to a gaming motherboard, you can add a 10Gbe ethernet card.  ...It's going to use a lot of PCI-e lanes.   (it would if it was onboard too afterall)

[VivyScarlett]

14 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

To be frank, if content creation that you were doing was being bottlenecked by your 1GbE network you'd have mentioned it first.  This is you trying to reach futher to justify it because you decided you needed it before you had a reason to need it.  And once we get out of gaming and into content creation we are no longer talking about gaming products, are we?  If you want to give workstation grade capabilities to a gaming motherboard, you can add a 10Gbe ethernet card.  ...It's going to use a lot of PCI-e lanes.   (it would if it was onboard too afterall)

I said "This is based more towards the extreme side of tech, i.e: gaming boards." With "i.e" meaning for example, I'm not saying that either one of us is right but I'd like you to look at this with the mind of what manufactures can do to improve on motherboards and less with what is applicable for today's use. I want a board ready for the future like my last board that has lasted me 5 years and is still running amazingly. For example the only real USB-C solution I see so far for front panel USB-C is this: https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessory/USB-31-UPD-PANEL/ . I just hope that the next version isn't using such a un-used interface like sata express. I want a motherboard that is ready for the future, this includes features such as USB-C Front Panel Headers for the already becoming universal type C connector.