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@ 2007/07/13TOP NOTCH mainboards are not cheap, with $500 a piece not too far from the most expensive offerings - especially if the mainboard happens to use the Extremely Expensive Nvidia 680i chipset, which can easily amount to close to a half of the total board cost. Of course, if a given mainboard enables you to achieve, say, 20% extra performance out of a system costing a total of $5,000, then the extra $100 for a good board equates two per cent of system cost for 20% of performance. That sounds like a good deal to me.<br><br>
However, overclocking performance benefits in practice can't be easily quantified inside the brochures. So, to differentiate themselves, the boards have to rely on the feature sets. Now, look at a typical high end mainboard like, say, Asus Striker Extreme or MSI P35 Platinum - the list of features alone, in either case, would fill in two printed pages. How many of these does a high end user really need, and are there some capabilities still sorely missing?
However, overclocking performance benefits in practice can't be easily quantified inside the brochures. So, to differentiate themselves, the boards have to rely on the feature sets. Now, look at a typical high end mainboard like, say, Asus Striker Extreme or MSI P35 Platinum - the list of features alone, in either case, would fill in two printed pages. How many of these does a high end user really need, and are there some capabilities still sorely missing?
