The Future of Motherboards: A Discussion on Standardization and Compatibility

As we stand at the cusp of a new era in computer hardware, one topic that has been gaining significant attention is the evolution of motherboards. With the rapid advancements in technology, motherboard designers are now faced with the daunting task of creating products that cater to the ever-changing needs of users. In this article, we will delve into the world of motherboards and explore some of the key features, challenges, and potential solutions that are shaping the future of this crucial component.

One of the most exciting aspects of modern motherboards is the emphasis on cable management. Gone are the days of exposed cables and cluttered workstations. Today's motherboard designs prioritize aesthetics and usability, with features like sleeved cables and cleverly hidden connectors. While some may view these innovations as unnecessary extravagances, they undoubtedly enhance the overall user experience. Take, for example, the 24-pin power connector connected to the EPS headers – this design decision allows users to keep their cable management tidy while still maintaining access to the critical components.

However, not everyone is convinced that modern motherboards are a step forward. Some argue that the complexity of these designs can lead to user frustration and increased costs. When a motherboard fails or needs to be upgraded, users may find themselves dealing with a tangled web of cables and components, making the process more difficult than it needs to be. This criticism is particularly valid for those who value simplicity and ease of use. As one user noted, "I think Cable Management obviously is the big one... having to redo all of that [when a motherboard fails] is a pain in the butt." It's clear that while modern motherboards offer many benefits, they also come with their own set of challenges.

Another aspect of modern motherboards that has sparked debate is the emphasis on thermal testing and thermal management. The introduction of high-power connectors like the 600-watt capable connector has raised concerns about overheating and thermal stress. While some manufacturers have made significant strides in addressing these issues, others may be lagging behind. As one user noted, "I'm curious how it performs thermally because there's a very hot area of the board got m.2 SSD you're burying it with a video card and then it's I [think] this is supposed to be like 600 watt capable connector so thermally... I'm wondering is a thermally because."

Standardization and compatibility are also key concerns for motherboard manufacturers. With the rise of proprietary designs and custom ecosystems, users may find themselves locked into specific brands or products. This can lead to difficulties when upgrading or replacing components, as well as increased costs due to limited availability of compatible parts. As one user noted, "I think probably not... that would be by Design I think the whole idea is to lock you into like their case motherboard sort of kind of like a power tool thing the platform locking the ecosystem." It's clear that standardization and compatibility are essential for creating a truly inclusive and user-friendly industry.

The concept of standardized connectors has long been debated, with some manufacturers advocating for a single, universal connector format. While this may seem ideal, it's unlikely that such a system will be adopted anytime soon. Instead, we can expect to see a mix of proprietary designs and custom solutions, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. As one user noted, "obviously like PCI Sig or something someone who can be a neutral party to get everybody on board plus there's a lot of power through the board so board costs will go up and probably video card costs would go up as well... I think that would need to be standardized by like PCI Sig or something."

The Future of Motherboards: A Conclusion

As we conclude our discussion on modern motherboards, it's clear that this industry is rapidly evolving. With a focus on cable management, thermal testing, and standardization, manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. While there may be challenges ahead, the potential rewards for users are significant. As one user noted, "I have mixed feelings... some cool things straight away that I hadn't thought about when I started thinking about it" – it's clear that modern motherboards are a step forward, but not without their own set of complexities.

In the comments section of our video on this topic, we were surprised to find one user who had left a negative comment. When asked if they ever read the comments and became irrationally angry at them, despite being about themselves, the answer was a resounding yes – "Yes because I was doing that the other day... I think I left the tab and came back and I saw comment and it was something about you and I was like I didn't say that don't be negative about either sorry don't be negative at either of the stage just don't do it." This anecdote highlights the importance of maintaining a level head, even in the face of criticism.

As we move forward into this exciting new era of computer hardware, one thing is clear: the future of motherboards is bright. With their emphasis on cable management, thermal testing, and standardization, manufacturers are creating products that prioritize usability and performance. While challenges lie ahead, it's likely that these innovations will continue to shape the industry for years to come.

In our next article, we'll delve into the world of graphics cards – a key component that plays a critical role in modern computing. From NVIDIA's latest GPUs to AMD's Ryzen offerings, we'll explore the latest trends and technologies that are driving this fast-paced industry forward.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone so we're at the thermal tank booth at computex 2023 this video is going to be a combination of talking about cases and also this unique motherboard we'll call it a form factor that Asus is trying out at the show uh we're gonna have multiple videos from thermaltakes Booth because they have a lot of really cool case mods first of all and they also have some new cases but for this one specifically I really wanted to break out a standalone video talking about the potential for new form factors where we already talked about msi's board where they had the cables on the back of the board gigabytes tried it Asus is trying it but Asus is doing something particularly unique where they've mounted uh the power to the board so no pcie cable now we did a little bit of extra testing here because I know some of you have seen coverage of this already so we wanted to add a little bit more to the story before that this video is brought to you by Deep cool and the new zero dark series of ak-620 and ak-400 CPU coolers we previously reviewed the ak-620 and AKA 400 and found them to be among a new crop of extremely competitive coolers for the price the new zero dark and zero dark plus variations move out to a blackout color design with blackout FDB fans the heat sinks otherwise have the same characteristics as those that we tested previously and found to be well performing just with a fresh new look learn more at the link in the description below what I was looking at specifically was how was this pinned out because we know that from Gordon actually at PC World I saw in his report Asus told him that the footer can handle up to 600 watts asus's card that they were showing was a 40 70 I think and so the idea is you would slot it into the board here it has the normal pcie it's got a foot here that connects and then that is where you get your 600 watts for the capacity for the power delivery all of that gets routed through the back which we'll look at on the case side the thing that needs to be considered now is obviously the the depth so you a little bit of extra depth to accommodate cable sticking out of the back of the motherboard and that's where with like thermaltake for example you see the extra space on the back side of the chassis which we can throw to b-roll or something of uh because you have these headers sticking out and this is not standard so this becomes a challenge for everybody because on the case manufacturer side they're going to have to design for the largest common denominator here whoever ends up sticking the cables out as far as whether it's 90 degree or in stand up like it is right now yet to be determined because it's not standardized so that's the part I wanted to talk about now the demo part this is a series 500 TG they have a series 300 TG which we'll cover more in our other video that's focused on the case but that one shows more of a fully complete system all wired on the back side gives a preview for what's to come on this which I think there's a chance this becomes not necessarily the footer but the cables on the back becomes an industry standard potentially if there's enough interest in hiding the cables it shouldn't change the motherboard cost but what Asus is doing here will affects cost so this is the idea I wanted to explore where if you think about it 600 watts going through here when we proved it I basically uh we checked each of these pins so we went through all pins down here we went through all pins up here and on the back of the board let's just rotate this come around the other side there's a 12 volt high power which is right there so the scent side is the 12 volt side the opposite side nearest to where I'm pointing is ground and I probe to the ground against the pins and I broke 12 volt against the pins and the end result is uh it looks like Asus is currently mapping it as uh it's four sets so it's gonna be eight total four of these sets of pins is 12 volt and then the ones closer to the socket are mapped to ground on the 12 volt high power connector so coming back to what Gordon showed and I I don't know if we're going to be able to get footage while we're here or not it's at the Asus Booth so uh we'll see if I get arrested uh but if we're not able to get footage Gordon showed two large um copper planes basically and he wasn't sure if they were ground or 12 volt it looks like they're both it's one of each so anyway that's the layout for the topics uh as a builder that I so there's pros and cons this is what I really want to talk about where on the pros it's pretty obvious you get new case designs a bit wider and you get to hide the cabling so that is obviously an upside and that's the primary upside here is just getting rid of cable clutter the pro is on the video card similar thing that's the last remaining Cable in the case at this point once you've moved everything else to the back so it's a natural progression the downside of doing this uh there's actually a few one of them is cost where motherboard cost will have to go up so uh you have to have probably a thicker PCB might have to have a better power delivery or certainly better thermal Management in the region of the board where all this power is going through and this also happens to be a pretty hot area of the board now the PCB the motherboard PCB really doesn't care what temperature it is just copper and fiberglass it's everything else around it you have to consider so there could be some effects on say m.2 ssds which already run notoriously hot now are mounted kind of under a GPU and now you're also running power directly through the board near them so there's a lot of power management to consider another point I was thinking through this this morning one of the other topics is um video card length so if video cards now have to as they're designed to make the decision do we go for a longer card that can fit in these ATX sort of distant power sockets versus a card that's more normal you potentially lose some of the ITX like super short Card Market because if they need to use that space to hit an ATX special power connector you're not gonna be able to make it short like in some of the cars we have now to say be more square with an ITX board so that was another consideration I ran into with this I guess pre-builts would be another one where uh getting video cards holding them stable in cases has already become a challenge so you see manufacturers like thermaltake starting to add in built-in uh supports like this one and some of them will clap from both sides some of them screw into the card there's a lot of different options but these are these are not memes anymore this is like you actually kind of need them especially if you're gonna ship it as a pre-built system because once it's a pre-built it gets dropped one foot once by UPS the amount of weight on these cards gonna Flex at the end and we've seen actually in cases that don't support the card properly we've seen the slot get literally ripped out of the board so my concern is if there's not enough support and you're running power through here this now becomes a risk for the user if it is not fully seated when they turn it on so those are kind of the downsides we went over the upsides I I think the biggest one to think about here is really just going to be one of standardization for the industry so it's just not easy for you you have to consider case manufacturers Builders and motherboard manufacturers if every motherboard vendor thinks they have the best way to do this case manufacturers are looking at it going what the hell do we do whose standard do we support because they all have slightly different spacing positioning on the back of the board so it's a clear for a company like thermaltank or Silverstone or whoever to perfectly Place cable cut throughs they can go wider of course but now you're cutting down on your room to play with case design if you wanted to do a shorter case so if you have to account for all this potential error because you don't know exactly where the cable passenger is going to be that makes the case designer's job much more difficult so those are kind of the aspects to consider for this to actually get any momentum and move anywhere uh I don't know who needs to pull the trigger first there is case support so thermaltake's got this one they have the Series 300 that will show on footage uh that's a smaller version of this cheaper version of this so case are coming silverstone's got one MSI ironically didn't ASU should have one but what we're missing is the motherboard Groundswell and that's something that we'll see how that shakes out because it's going to affect the whole ecosystem I mean it's it's not as straightforward as just by any board any case with the same form factor and then it works so that's what we wanted to throw out there is you know we're near the end of the show and what we like to do near the end of the show is discussion topics so here's the trends we're seeing emerge what does this mean for the different uh category manufacturers in the industry and then what does this mean for consumers and will it actually happen because a lot of times it shows you see stuff that will never happen it's just cool showpiece I do think back of the board cabling will I don't know about the Asus footer I think that would need to be standardized by like PCI Sig or something someone who can be a neutral party to get everybody on board plus there's a lot of power through the board so board costs will go up and probably video card costs would go up as well um because now you need uh to change the design of the layout so we were filming here and talking about all of this and a wild Steve walked by Steve well save what what are your thoughts on this I have mixed feelings of this board uh I haven't worked out whether I do like or don't like it some cool things straight away that I hadn't you know when I started thinking about it I think Cable Management obviously is the big one like hiding the cables out the back but for me personally I think I don't know about you guys when you build a system a test system and the motherboard doesn't work or something and you've got to change the board out having to redo all of that is a pain in the butt it's kind of not a user experience thing really but it is really nice just being able to pull those cables out stick a new board in and I'm probably thinking more like a vrm thermal testing and there's more access to the back of the board which also makes gov thermal testing really easy so I like those aspects of it but then I don't know sleeved cables they're kind of cool aren't they like a lot of people love their sleeve cables so you're kind of removing something that people like I feel like maybe the 24 pin power connected to the EPS connectors leave them on the front so you get your nice sleeve cameras but all the you know USB 2 headers and stuff like that that's kind of cool at the back but I suppose if you're going to do that you might as well do all of it I know what do you think I my then I'm wondering is a thermally because there's a very hot area of the board got m.2 SSD you're burying it with a video card and then it's I I heard this is supposed to be like 600 watt capable connector so thermally I'm curious how it performs but the the bigger thing I was wondering about is uh standardization and compatibility that's the big one yeah so so where do you do you think the board vendors can get on on board with a standard do you where do you see this going in terms of once it leaves or can it leave just Asus I think probably not and that would be by Design I think the whole idea is to lock you into like their case motherboard sort of kind of like a power tool thing the platform locking the ecosystem so I think that's probably my design whether you can get I think MSI has uh project zero theirs was called yeah whether you can put like a project zero board in you know an Asus case I I don't know I have no idea on that but I think that's probably going to be one of the hurdles and then obviously like how long do they do this for is it popular or how many boards can you get like is it like a is it worse than like matx or mini agx type stuff so yeah it's it's cool I'm not I don't know again I don't really know if I'm for or against I haven't really thought about that much but there's definitely some cool things about it that I like I have one more question for you do you ever read the comments on our videos see the word Steve and if it's a critical comment do you become irrationally angry at it even though it's about me yes because I was doing that the other day I was reading the comments on one of your videos and I think I left the tab and came back and I saw comment and it was something about you and I was like I didn't say that don't be negative about either sorry don't be negative at either of the stage just don't do it yeah it's just not a good idea I mean I think we all know this at this point so anyway thanks Steve and uh back to you Steve's at Hardware unboxed go check them out anyway let us know what you think of the comments and check back for our coverage of the throttle take cases they have some really cool ones so the entire CTE series uh actually one of them in particular we were looking at yesterday and we'll show this in the other video has a rotated board layout and it's positioned centrally which is super cool because it's a more unique design approach and it gets thermaltake into a category of cases that I think starts to set them apart from Mass market so check back for that video and thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next timehey everyone so we're at the thermal tank booth at computex 2023 this video is going to be a combination of talking about cases and also this unique motherboard we'll call it a form factor that Asus is trying out at the show uh we're gonna have multiple videos from thermaltakes Booth because they have a lot of really cool case mods first of all and they also have some new cases but for this one specifically I really wanted to break out a standalone video talking about the potential for new form factors where we already talked about msi's board where they had the cables on the back of the board gigabytes tried it Asus is trying it but Asus is doing something particularly unique where they've mounted uh the power to the board so no pcie cable now we did a little bit of extra testing here because I know some of you have seen coverage of this already so we wanted to add a little bit more to the story before that this video is brought to you by Deep cool and the new zero dark series of ak-620 and ak-400 CPU coolers we previously reviewed the ak-620 and AKA 400 and found them to be among a new crop of extremely competitive coolers for the price the new zero dark and zero dark plus variations move out to a blackout color design with blackout FDB fans the heat sinks otherwise have the same characteristics as those that we tested previously and found to be well performing just with a fresh new look learn more at the link in the description below what I was looking at specifically was how was this pinned out because we know that from Gordon actually at PC World I saw in his report Asus told him that the footer can handle up to 600 watts asus's card that they were showing was a 40 70 I think and so the idea is you would slot it into the board here it has the normal pcie it's got a foot here that connects and then that is where you get your 600 watts for the capacity for the power delivery all of that gets routed through the back which we'll look at on the case side the thing that needs to be considered now is obviously the the depth so you a little bit of extra depth to accommodate cable sticking out of the back of the motherboard and that's where with like thermaltake for example you see the extra space on the back side of the chassis which we can throw to b-roll or something of uh because you have these headers sticking out and this is not standard so this becomes a challenge for everybody because on the case manufacturer side they're going to have to design for the largest common denominator here whoever ends up sticking the cables out as far as whether it's 90 degree or in stand up like it is right now yet to be determined because it's not standardized so that's the part I wanted to talk about now the demo part this is a series 500 TG they have a series 300 TG which we'll cover more in our other video that's focused on the case but that one shows more of a fully complete system all wired on the back side gives a preview for what's to come on this which I think there's a chance this becomes not necessarily the footer but the cables on the back becomes an industry standard potentially if there's enough interest in hiding the cables it shouldn't change the motherboard cost but what Asus is doing here will affects cost so this is the idea I wanted to explore where if you think about it 600 watts going through here when we proved it I basically uh we checked each of these pins so we went through all pins down here we went through all pins up here and on the back of the board let's just rotate this come around the other side there's a 12 volt high power which is right there so the scent side is the 12 volt side the opposite side nearest to where I'm pointing is ground and I probe to the ground against the pins and I broke 12 volt against the pins and the end result is uh it looks like Asus is currently mapping it as uh it's four sets so it's gonna be eight total four of these sets of pins is 12 volt and then the ones closer to the socket are mapped to ground on the 12 volt high power connector so coming back to what Gordon showed and I I don't know if we're going to be able to get footage while we're here or not it's at the Asus Booth so uh we'll see if I get arrested uh but if we're not able to get footage Gordon showed two large um copper planes basically and he wasn't sure if they were ground or 12 volt it looks like they're both it's one of each so anyway that's the layout for the topics uh as a builder that I so there's pros and cons this is what I really want to talk about where on the pros it's pretty obvious you get new case designs a bit wider and you get to hide the cabling so that is obviously an upside and that's the primary upside here is just getting rid of cable clutter the pro is on the video card similar thing that's the last remaining Cable in the case at this point once you've moved everything else to the back so it's a natural progression the downside of doing this uh there's actually a few one of them is cost where motherboard cost will have to go up so uh you have to have probably a thicker PCB might have to have a better power delivery or certainly better thermal Management in the region of the board where all this power is going through and this also happens to be a pretty hot area of the board now the PCB the motherboard PCB really doesn't care what temperature it is just copper and fiberglass it's everything else around it you have to consider so there could be some effects on say m.2 ssds which already run notoriously hot now are mounted kind of under a GPU and now you're also running power directly through the board near them so there's a lot of power management to consider another point I was thinking through this this morning one of the other topics is um video card length so if video cards now have to as they're designed to make the decision do we go for a longer card that can fit in these ATX sort of distant power sockets versus a card that's more normal you potentially lose some of the ITX like super short Card Market because if they need to use that space to hit an ATX special power connector you're not gonna be able to make it short like in some of the cars we have now to say be more square with an ITX board so that was another consideration I ran into with this I guess pre-builts would be another one where uh getting video cards holding them stable in cases has already become a challenge so you see manufacturers like thermaltake starting to add in built-in uh supports like this one and some of them will clap from both sides some of them screw into the card there's a lot of different options but these are these are not memes anymore this is like you actually kind of need them especially if you're gonna ship it as a pre-built system because once it's a pre-built it gets dropped one foot once by UPS the amount of weight on these cards gonna Flex at the end and we've seen actually in cases that don't support the card properly we've seen the slot get literally ripped out of the board so my concern is if there's not enough support and you're running power through here this now becomes a risk for the user if it is not fully seated when they turn it on so those are kind of the downsides we went over the upsides I I think the biggest one to think about here is really just going to be one of standardization for the industry so it's just not easy for you you have to consider case manufacturers Builders and motherboard manufacturers if every motherboard vendor thinks they have the best way to do this case manufacturers are looking at it going what the hell do we do whose standard do we support because they all have slightly different spacing positioning on the back of the board so it's a clear for a company like thermaltank or Silverstone or whoever to perfectly Place cable cut throughs they can go wider of course but now you're cutting down on your room to play with case design if you wanted to do a shorter case so if you have to account for all this potential error because you don't know exactly where the cable passenger is going to be that makes the case designer's job much more difficult so those are kind of the aspects to consider for this to actually get any momentum and move anywhere uh I don't know who needs to pull the trigger first there is case support so thermaltake's got this one they have the Series 300 that will show on footage uh that's a smaller version of this cheaper version of this so case are coming silverstone's got one MSI ironically didn't ASU should have one but what we're missing is the motherboard Groundswell and that's something that we'll see how that shakes out because it's going to affect the whole ecosystem I mean it's it's not as straightforward as just by any board any case with the same form factor and then it works so that's what we wanted to throw out there is you know we're near the end of the show and what we like to do near the end of the show is discussion topics so here's the trends we're seeing emerge what does this mean for the different uh category manufacturers in the industry and then what does this mean for consumers and will it actually happen because a lot of times it shows you see stuff that will never happen it's just cool showpiece I do think back of the board cabling will I don't know about the Asus footer I think that would need to be standardized by like PCI Sig or something someone who can be a neutral party to get everybody on board plus there's a lot of power through the board so board costs will go up and probably video card costs would go up as well um because now you need uh to change the design of the layout so we were filming here and talking about all of this and a wild Steve walked by Steve well save what what are your thoughts on this I have mixed feelings of this board uh I haven't worked out whether I do like or don't like it some cool things straight away that I hadn't you know when I started thinking about it I think Cable Management obviously is the big one like hiding the cables out the back but for me personally I think I don't know about you guys when you build a system a test system and the motherboard doesn't work or something and you've got to change the board out having to redo all of that is a pain in the butt it's kind of not a user experience thing really but it is really nice just being able to pull those cables out stick a new board in and I'm probably thinking more like a vrm thermal testing and there's more access to the back of the board which also makes gov thermal testing really easy so I like those aspects of it but then I don't know sleeved cables they're kind of cool aren't they like a lot of people love their sleeve cables so you're kind of removing something that people like I feel like maybe the 24 pin power connected to the EPS connectors leave them on the front so you get your nice sleeve cameras but all the you know USB 2 headers and stuff like that that's kind of cool at the back but I suppose if you're going to do that you might as well do all of it I know what do you think I my then I'm wondering is a thermally because there's a very hot area of the board got m.2 SSD you're burying it with a video card and then it's I I heard this is supposed to be like 600 watt capable connector so thermally I'm curious how it performs but the the bigger thing I was wondering about is uh standardization and compatibility that's the big one yeah so so where do you do you think the board vendors can get on on board with a standard do you where do you see this going in terms of once it leaves or can it leave just Asus I think probably not and that would be by Design I think the whole idea is to lock you into like their case motherboard sort of kind of like a power tool thing the platform locking the ecosystem so I think that's probably my design whether you can get I think MSI has uh project zero theirs was called yeah whether you can put like a project zero board in you know an Asus case I I don't know I have no idea on that but I think that's probably going to be one of the hurdles and then obviously like how long do they do this for is it popular or how many boards can you get like is it like a is it worse than like matx or mini agx type stuff so yeah it's it's cool I'm not I don't know again I don't really know if I'm for or against I haven't really thought about that much but there's definitely some cool things about it that I like I have one more question for you do you ever read the comments on our videos see the word Steve and if it's a critical comment do you become irrationally angry at it even though it's about me yes because I was doing that the other day I was reading the comments on one of your videos and I think I left the tab and came back and I saw comment and it was something about you and I was like I didn't say that don't be negative about either sorry don't be negative at either of the stage just don't do it yeah it's just not a good idea I mean I think we all know this at this point so anyway thanks Steve and uh back to you Steve's at Hardware unboxed go check them out anyway let us know what you think of the comments and check back for our coverage of the throttle take cases they have some really cool ones so the entire CTE series uh actually one of them in particular we were looking at yesterday and we'll show this in the other video has a rotated board layout and it's positioned centrally which is super cool because it's a more unique design approach and it gets thermaltake into a category of cases that I think starts to set them apart from Mass market so check back for that video and thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"