let's talk about motherboard features.

I just updated A motherboard, from a gigabyte f2a55m-ds2 to an asrock fm2a88x extreme6+.
the gigabyte board did not have the things I needed, it was sata2 and usb 2.0, no usb 3.0.
I am working with many thousands of tiny txt files in note pad.
they are notes we as a team have made over a long time for our test day and get ready to go home meetings.
I open a note pad file, open the folder that i have stored all these files in, open a file, copy and paste the little gem in the one to the other, close it and delete it from the folder.
there are so many files that just deleting the one file took about 15-20 seconds before i could open the next one, I had to wait for the progress bar at the top to go all the way across the address bar, Rgone had me complete 15-20 files before deleting them and this helped.

so I got the new board with sata 3 and now it is so much faster.
I am quite suprised at this as normally all my great ideas go to pot faster than a teenager in colorado. I talked with Rgone before installing this and neither of us figured I would see anything in it.
Usb 3.0 is a joy to have back also as you might expect.

what feature have you forgone only to beg to have it back, or what feature can you just not live without?

Power/reset buttons built on to the motherboard

ATMINSIDE said:

Power/reset buttons built on to the motherboard

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That's probably mine as well. And quick cmos reset button too.

Last PC I had was an AMD Opteron 148 @3ghz with over 1.6 volts, full custom waterloop, SLI GT7800's (back then a GTX was the equivalent of todays "ti") a DFI LP Ultra-D with the SLI trace mod, an OCZ GameXstream 600w PSU and 2gb of OCZ DDR500.

Everything about the new stuff is better, so I haven't figured out what I cant live without. Probably UEFI BIOS lol. Quite a treat after being out of the "loop" for awhile

Like atm said the power buttons. I don't have them... But I can see how they'd be very nice to have...

Tons of usb ports. I need em! 2 for my keyboard, 1 for mouse, 1 for mic, 2 for sound stuff, 1 for a controller, 1 for my keyboard, 1 for my phone, 1-2 at any point for external HDD's. Thats 10-11 ports at time. My intel board has 6 ports, so I had to "pick and choose" what I had going, and my sabertooth has 14 usb ports. Makes life more simple

bob4933 said:

Tons of usb ports. I need em! 2 for my keyboard, 1 for mouse, 1 for mic, 2 for sound stuff, 1 for a controller, 1 for my keyboard, 1 for my phone, 1-2 at any point for external HDD's. Thats 10-11 ports at time. My intel board has 6 ports, so I had to "pick and choose" what I had going, and my sabertooth has 14 usb ports. Makes life more simple

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My MSI 970 has 10 on the rear panel (2 are the gold plated "gaming ports") Just wish more were USB3.0

Power/reset buttons built on to the motherboard

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OOOH I totally agree.

bob4933 said:

Tons of usb ports. I need em! 2 for my keyboard, 1 for mouse, 1 for mic, 2 for sound stuff, 1 for a controller, 1 for my keyboard, 1 for my phone, 1-2 at any point for external HDD's. Thats 10-11 ports at time. My intel board has 6 ports, so I had to "pick and choose" what I had going, and my sabertooth has 14 usb ports. Makes life more simple

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I have to agree with Bob. I need 1 for my keyboard, 1 for my mouse, 1 for my headset, 1 for my PSU, 1 for my phone, 1 for a controller, 1 for a bluetooth dongle, 1 for a thumb drive/external drive... and then it's always nice to have a spare one or two left over.

Onboard Power/Reset switches (makes bench testing easier), onboard fan headers (more than two) (my current main PC only has two fan headers, it annoys me), more than four rear USB ports (four just isn't enough, and only two is way too few (problem with older motherboards)), onboard bios reset button (have liked those the few times I've used them), dual bios chip boards. REMOVABLE bios chips (socketed, not soldered), makes replacement so much easier if the chip goes bad.

A bios/chipset with the ability to run RAM asynchronous from FSB/BCLK (makes overclocking easier).

For me a typical USB setup is mouse, keyboard, printer, multi-card reader, sometimes an external HDD dock, sometimes another keyboard (wireless), sometimes a second printer (I had two printers hooked up for probably a year).

What I can't live without. Abundant fan headers. I have a few older and lower budget boards with only 2 headers. I don't like using molex plugs for them because I still have molex powered drives.

What I'm so great full motherboards no longer have. Dipswitches and drives that needed to be configured as slave or master. GOOD RIDANCE.

Blaylock said:

What I'm so great full motherboards no longer have. Dipswitches and drives that needed to be configured as slave or master. GOOD RIDANCE.

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to that Blaylock

I see there is a huge difference between USB 3.0 controllers and there are many issues regarding drivers and hardware itself.
Recently I was testing flashdrives, SD/SDXC/micro SD/SDXC cards and other stuff on USB 3.0. In theory USB 3.0 supposed to make over 600MB/s but in real if you see anything above 400MB/s then you should be happy.

- Lexar Professional DD512 storage which has declared max bandwidth of 450MB/s could make max 430MB/s on the best controller I found. On all other controllers results were between 220 and 380MB/s. It's like 100% difference between some controllers even though specification is the same.
- USB 3.0 card reader with SDXC card which can make 300MB/s was performing between ~150 and 300MB/s depends from motherboard.
- Toshiba flash drive could make between 170 and 235MB/s.

Win8/8.1 has only built-in driver which is sometimes underperforming or locking at low performance mode ( ~40MB/s ). What's worse you can't fix it, reinstall etc. If you delete it then I'm not sure if there is any way to fix it or at least I haven't found a way to make it.

On laptops USB 3.0 ports are working between 100 and 300MB/s. I haven't seen any laptop which offers higher performance and I was testing couple of new Lenovo and Dell.

So we see that new boards already have USB 3.1 but manufacturers can't solve performance issues with 3.0 not to mention about reaching max bandwidth.

I'm usng USB devices a lot and something like underperforming or problems with connecton are really annoying especially when you try to make results for review on a brand new 200MB/s+ drive and USB driver decides it won't run at more than 40MB/s.