Unhinged Rant About Motherboards

This rant video is largely stream-of-conscious complaint dumping about motherboard prices and the migration of useful features into ever-higher price classes, while less useful bloat pushes out the functionality. Although this may seem excessive for debug displays, it's an issue we genuinely care about here and firmly believe should be higher priority on motherboard part lists. With how difficult it can be to hit XMP on some of the modern kits, CPUs, and boards, a debug display is more useful than ever -- but they're also just good at eliminating doubt on which component may be failing. After GN recently had to shop for motherboards for test benches, we put together this rant to just get our complaints off the chest. Also, there weren't any clouds to yell at today.


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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Expect Chaos
01:27 - BUT WHY?!
02:18 - XMP Would Be Easier with Debugs
03:54 - Why We're Ranting
08:05 - Depressing Price Data
11:20 - The Wrong Features
13:02 - ASUS MALWARE TANGENT RANT
14:01 - ROGROGROGROGROG
17:26 - Malicious Segmentation
22:15 - Useful for Everyone

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Host, Unhinged Lunatic, Writing: Steve Burke
Enabler of Lunacy (Research): Jeremy Clayton
Video: Vitalii Makhnovets

[GamersNexus]

Thoughts on the older style of GN video?

[paulking]

The debug LED is treated as a premium option. They used to be on every cheap ass motherboard back in the day. The freaking things only cost pennies to add to a motherboard.

[kizuati]

Unhinged Steve is something we lack and something we need more of

[cwm]

Two points: 1) debugging features probably reduce RMAs and save money 2) Ask the engineers to code errors into the RGB LEDs that are on the board for aesthetics. If you have 8 RGB LEDS and you just stick to just off, red, green, and blue, you can encode 4^8 states, and you have your (somewhat inconvenient) error code readout.

[ParkerTyler]

Thanks for this video! 6 years ago I built a computer using an Asus ROG Hero board that I got for $215. This year as I was building my new computer I was so confused why the same product line, the hero boards, were $600. I still can't for the life of me figure out what makes it a $600 board. Bought an ROG strix board instead that had all the same features for $250. Board manufacturers have lost their minds.

[BoostedBill]

Motherboard pricing is absolutely insane. Thanks Steve for trying to bring features to lower tier motherboards

[AscalonFI]

"For those who dare"
"game first, work later"
I swear those phrases are the equivalent of "live, love, laugh" for gamers

[kylestewart]

I’ve been saying this for a while. A easy debug display make troubleshooting so much easier and the cost to the manufacturer is negligible. It should be a standard feature on all consumer boards above $150, which is basically all motherboards now.

[MadPhantom]

Most people don't care about the debug LED until something breaks and then have to tear their hair out trying to look at blinking lights. When I last upgraded I only looked at a motherboard which had an led display for error codes. Things break over time and it's always useful to have to be able to easily see what the issue is.

[CazRaX]

Love how it was the engineers who told him "not our call, make noise so we can tell them to change things", just shows that engineers are real people while marketing and execs are not.

[darthllama]

As a gamer and general PC user, I for one am happy we have GN to act as a voice for the majority of us. This 'rant' was really just 24 minutes of good old fashioned common sense. Thanks Steve.. please keep doing what you guys do, we all benefit from it.

[ThatGayWolf]

The timing on this is incredible. I JUST built my first PC since the start of the pandemic for a friend, and I was SHOCKED the board I bought didn't have a post code readout, nor an on-board beep functionality, and the case I was using didn't have a speaker either because that's well out of style hahahah. Like you said, it used to be you just EXPECTED it was on the board if you were buying mid-tier

[MassiStar]

Thanks Steve. Basically someone needed to say this out loud. Corporations like these will literally snag up any little excuse for keeping prices high. One day very soon no one will be able for afford anything...how will that help their margins when that happens.

[SyntheticFuture]

I remember 200 dollar boards being the top of the line for a long time. Now 200 bucks is not even the basic features 😅

[ElbowFalls]

Wait until seven segment goes to a subscription based model. That rant will be gold.

[silver]

I am very glad you tackle and publicize these seemingly minor issues. It's a creeping complacency in the consumers of this industry that must be stopped. We must stand our ground and demand our products do not diminish in quality over time. We do not want to end up like the lightbulb business.

[phoboskop]

I fully support what you're saying. We used to have POST code displays in 775 days on most enthusiast boards, and for top tier (I think it was P5E3 Premium or P5E64 WS Evo) ASUS even had a separate dongle with power/reset buttons and debug code you could plug into the board. The debug displays were common till Haswell era, but that's when RGB madness started.

Out of other useful features that boards used to have that were completely abandoned (or pushed into extreme segment), because they're not sexy:
- power/reset buttons, great stuff for quickly testing without a case
- proper dual BIOS, not like things Gigabyte did when you had 2 chips on the PCB but it switched randomly, or the stuff from Asus where a part of code is shared between both bioses and when you change major ME version on one IOS, the other stops working
- saving BIOS profiles to USB
- enhanced diagnostics such as embedded MemTest

[TimidSylveon]

“Sales usually wins.” As an engineer, I felt that in my soul.

[jackconrad]

“Let’s make people as financially uncomfortable as possible while building a computer” Couldn’t be more true.

[triviszla]

Thanks for this. I followed because I wanted to get a PC but didn't know anything about brands, components, etc. I also had the impression that more expensive meant more better. Videos like these are a great help to the ignorant like myself. I greatly appreciate it.