Editorial: High end Mainboards need more I/O
 

TOP 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?

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40969