With some new motherboard connection systems being shown and a recent video by Gamers Nexus ranting about motherboard designs, I have been in more than a few discussions about what I think we should change in the way we design motherboards. I have thought this through over the years and have some strong opinions, and while they might not be wildly popular, they are based on my own experience and usage scenario.
The opinions I will express below are ENTIRELY my own and I know of no motherboard manufacturer looking at this type of design. However, if a motherboard manufacturer decides they want to try the ideas listed here, please note you heard them here first.
First, we need to set some criteria, the aims, goals and market that I want this design to be for.
- Gamers: The aim will not be for prosumers, over clockers or tech enthusiasts This will be for gamers, period. Wait, you’re going to say there are already a lot of gamer motherboards out there now. Well, I disagree. The “gamer” motherboards on the market are aimed at the other mentioned markets, have some ARGB thrown on it and are then called gaming motherboards. I plan to focus on the specific needs of gamers. By Gamers I am referring to people that use their PC for content consumption (movies, watching streaming videos and gaming) as 90% or more of their usage.
- SFF: I have been a SFF enthusiast for some time and feel that for the above mentioned “gamer” market this form factor is a solid choice. Gamers only typically add on a graphics card so the need for additional expansion is seldom if ever used.
With these two main criteria in mind let’s talk about what I would change. Most of the changes I would like to propose are for the removal of features. This might sound odd, but I want to get to the essence of the PC Gamers needs and hopefully find a way to reduce the cost or at least redirect the cost to what I consider more useful features. Also, since we are looking at a SFF board, removal of certain items will free up board space.
Let’s start at the back of the case with the I/O.
- Remove all or at least most of the IGPU connections. Let’s face it gamers will not make use of an IGPU, they will be buying a discrete GPU to enjoy all that gaming goodness. We can free up some board space if we remove the display outputs that are not needed. If we do want to keep one output for emergency use, then a single HDMI would be fine. HDMI is on almost every display made modernly, so it makes a lot of sense.
- Add more USB to the I/O. Since we will be making a little more room on the motherboard with some other suggestions, how about we add some more USB for the back of the board. A second USB C would be nice along with at least 2 to 4 more USB A.
- ALWAYS have the back cover built onto the board. I seriously do not know why we do not have this on every board. The days of those little tin I/O covers you must put in the case should be OVER.
- Flash and Clear BIOS buttons: These are only occasionally required and while they may to some seem to be a techie add-on, they can bring some real quality of life to the end user when they are needed. No need to open the case and find the battery or clear a jumper and the BIOS flash makes it easy if the board is designed to last a few generations and you buy it later in its life with a newer CPU option.
See nothing really radical yet some nice common-sense options that would be easy to implement. Next how about we look at the front I/O.
Front I/O is a pain in the butt to connect and we all know it. What if we simplified the design.
- Buttons and Lights: So right now, the front I/O has 4 separate connections on it.
- Power Button
- Power Light
- Drive Activity Light
- Reset Button
The Reset button we can do away with completely. For years the tech world has told us it was not really a good solution and most people just do not use it. If the system hard locks you want to turn it off and back on, not reset it.
The power button of course is a must and needs to stay so there is nothing we can do there.
The power and HD light could be combined and has been in some case designs. The idea is that the power light is there to let you know the PC has power on. The HD light is there to show activity. Combining the two on a single header is EASY with just a slight alteration. Right now, the Drive LED comes on when the drive is active, reverse that. The LED is on all the time and turns off during activity. This means if there is power the LED will be on and flash when the drive is active. See simple, now we have a combined LED header and have taken the front I/O design down from 8 pins to 4. This could simplify the design of the plugs as well as allow for a simple 4 pin plug and we can do away with the tiny plugs we have now.
(As a quality of life feature the board maker could add a simple extension cable that attaches to the motherboard and then ends with the standard 4 pin design, allowing for easy cable management)
- Front Audio: The time has come for front audio to DIE… Most gamers know that using the front audio just introduces an increased chance to make electronic noise in your audio and mic, so they plug into the rear.
In fact, a case could be made to remove the onboard audio altogether as many gamers advocate moving to an external USB audio solution. I personally think this is a bridge too far. Onboard audio is viable with a decent codec and will help gamers keep the cost of the system down by not requiring you to buy an external solution. The key is to ensure a good quality codec when an amplifier is used.
Another area we can look to do some tweaking is with storage and RAM.
- Remove SATA connections. The time has come to embrace the SSD and NVME drives as pricing has fallen hard. By removing SATA we can free a little space for other things. Most quality ITX boards today already have dual M.2 connections and some even have three. This provides plenty of storage space for the needs of your typical gamer.
- Consider moving to SO-DIMMS for memory. These are widely available and offer similar speed and pricing options to a certain degree. SO-DIMMS do not have the “enthusiast” level of memory speeds but again for gamers the difference is not massively impactful.
The space savings from a lot of these thoughts could be used to add one or two more case fan headers. Possibly even an extra RGB header if you like.
As I noted at the start this is not a jack of all trades board idea, this is VERY specific. It would not be good for a small server or for someone that enjoys overclocking and high-end tweaking. This would not be a motherboard for more budget options, such as those that lean into iGPU based systems.
There is one other point I would press; this board needs to be reasonably priced. Right now, quality ITX boards for AM5 push the mid $200 price range (there is one exception right now at about $200) I would love to see us push that down to the $150 price point or below.
The above, in the end, is just me sitting around a fire pit brainstorming while enjoying a cigar and a glass of Brandy. I doubt this type of board would ever be made as the very specific considerations I made would not allow for a general-purpose design that would have mass market appeal. Sometimes however it is fun to knock around some ideas, maybe it will get someone thinking about doing things differently.The articles content, opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed in SAPPHIRE NATION are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent official policy or position of SAPPHIRE Technology.
