Unhinged Rant About Motherboards

Thoughts on the older style of GN video? Grab a GN 'Debug' Coaster Pack on the Store! Use code 'BUTWHY' for 10% off! store.gamersnexus.net/products/gn-drink-debug-coas… while code is active Watch our latest news video to learn about motherboards with cables on the back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBxBUIoeNYo

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"great design - can't wait to never see it" lmao

Please dear God more of this. This has been one of my favorite GN videos to date. Steve roasting products and manufacturers is always my favorite thing. I'm still recovering from when Steve said Thermaltake pulled air from the 4th dimension using a time cube alongside a tesseract. 😂

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

This is spot on. The motherboards today need to get back to having useful features instead of fancy screens no one really cares about

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.