Sunday, May 14th 2017
On Elmor's Open Letter, or The State of the Industry
A post on Reddit is doing the rounds from user elmor, a well-renowned enthusiast overclocker who works for ASUS' ROG Motherboard R&D - specifically, in the development of overclocking and enthusiast features. In his post, he talks about the posture of some motherboard makers, as well as about the state of the market as is, with some interesting tidbits thrown in.
One of the most interesting tidbits to be gleaned from his post is that from his perspective, overclocking's biggest supporters are Intel and AMD, who "seriously love overclocking and have excellent people pushing it internally"? AMD I understand - two generations now they've graced us with unlocked-multiplier processors. Intel, on the other hand, has locked-in overclocking efforts with their K-series processors, and have recently told enthusiasts that they should stop overclocking their i7 7700K CPUs, so... I'm a bit on the fence with the blue giant on that specific regard, at least when it comes to mainstream overclocking. My locked i5 6400 is doing just great in the overclocking department, mind you - just not thanks to Intel. Interestingly, Elmor also sets NVIDIA "in the corner of shame" because of their "reluctance to help us push the limits of PC hardware and locking things down more and more."
Elmor also specifically calls out MSI - giving the example of their X370 Xpower motherboard - as being a showcase of product development mainly guided by something akin to "slapping LEDs on it and call it gaming." And this is something that can be further developed, so bear with me for a little while.
The number of advertised features on motherboards have been growing exponentially (pardon my mathematically inaccurate statement, but you get the point.) Manufacturers have been more and more tending towards a "checklist" development so as to offer all the same bangs and whistles that their competitors do, while trying to throw in a specific twist of their own. There is an overabundance of features which all beg to be tested, but at the same time, they're mainly the same ideas and features implemented in a slightly different way, worded with a huge amount of marketing sugar sprinkled on top.
It's a race towards the top, with each manufacturer vying for the consumer's attention, which naturally also ends up bringing a feeling of "been there, done that" in regards to motherboards and their features. If one simply counts the number of implementations of a simple M.2 thermal shield, or an on-board Realtek audio chip, or a manufacturer's specific LED implementation and control on a motherboard level... Between May 14th and April 1st, we here on TPU have covered north of 20 new motherboard releases, and I'm pretty sure a few have slipped through the cracks.
This brings about the topic of market - and feature - saturation and overlapping. A quick and dirty check shows there are at least 59 (!) different motherboards which pack Realtek's ALC 1220 audio solution. Each manufacturer, however, has a distinct marketing for their product, be it Audio Boost (MSI), Supreme FX (ASUS), Purity Sound(ASRock), AMP-UP Audio (Gigabyte), Audio Boost 4 (MSI) or some other marketing naming.
This cutthroat competition and rapid pace of product launches, releases and re-releases with added features also ends up impacting review cycles and timing, as you could expect. The fact is that the number of advertised features is just too great to extensively cover, and keeping up with, with the depth we would like. I'd say that TPU's reviews - courtesy of our own excellent cadaveca - tend to go deeper than the norm, but that's also part of the reason why there are relatively few of them.
Baseline quality of any given motherboard, from the most bare-bones model to the highest of the top-end, have improved substantially over the years. This makes attributing review scores - or better, achieving differentiation through review scores - harder. And sure, there is a level of diplomacy involved regarding review scores. Is it the right thing to do to give a 7 to a motherboard because some non-essential features are slightly buggy? Should we award the 7 and "kill" the product's image outright, or be diplomatic - some would say sensible - and attribute a score based on the the delivery and the potential of the product? We've all heard of some bug fixes doing wonders for any given product. And a hypothetical 8.5 with reservations regarding the required fixing of some bugs, or a 7 solely on the basis that the bugs exist, paint completely different pictures. Fairness is a hard descriptor to achieve, but it's what must be sought after.
Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattering, and the entire market (not just the motherboard market, mind you), is built on it. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter entirely - companies who invest in new features do so knowing that their competitors will immediately look towards matching and surpassing their own implementation. They may have a head-start, but it won't ever be a significant one - and original design, feature and product development is much more expensive and time-consuming than imitation. Paving the road is the hardest part, not actually riding it.
Source:
Reddit
One of the most interesting tidbits to be gleaned from his post is that from his perspective, overclocking's biggest supporters are Intel and AMD, who "seriously love overclocking and have excellent people pushing it internally"? AMD I understand - two generations now they've graced us with unlocked-multiplier processors. Intel, on the other hand, has locked-in overclocking efforts with their K-series processors, and have recently told enthusiasts that they should stop overclocking their i7 7700K CPUs, so... I'm a bit on the fence with the blue giant on that specific regard, at least when it comes to mainstream overclocking. My locked i5 6400 is doing just great in the overclocking department, mind you - just not thanks to Intel. Interestingly, Elmor also sets NVIDIA "in the corner of shame" because of their "reluctance to help us push the limits of PC hardware and locking things down more and more."
This brings about the topic of market - and feature - saturation and overlapping. A quick and dirty check shows there are at least 59 (!) different motherboards which pack Realtek's ALC 1220 audio solution. Each manufacturer, however, has a distinct marketing for their product, be it Audio Boost (MSI), Supreme FX (ASUS), Purity Sound(ASRock), AMP-UP Audio (Gigabyte), Audio Boost 4 (MSI) or some other marketing naming.
Baseline quality of any given motherboard, from the most bare-bones model to the highest of the top-end, have improved substantially over the years. This makes attributing review scores - or better, achieving differentiation through review scores - harder. And sure, there is a level of diplomacy involved regarding review scores. Is it the right thing to do to give a 7 to a motherboard because some non-essential features are slightly buggy? Should we award the 7 and "kill" the product's image outright, or be diplomatic - some would say sensible - and attribute a score based on the the delivery and the potential of the product? We've all heard of some bug fixes doing wonders for any given product. And a hypothetical 8.5 with reservations regarding the required fixing of some bugs, or a 7 solely on the basis that the bugs exist, paint completely different pictures. Fairness is a hard descriptor to achieve, but it's what must be sought after.
82 Comments on On Elmor's Open Letter, or The State of the Industry
I think this guy have a problem Since nVidia's chips get overclocked to double the chip designed speed while squeezing 200MHz from Radeon GPU is something big.
I think the guy is another fanboy
Nvidia cards are voltage and power limited making all their cards end up at 2ghz or so no matter what cooler or board. Its more of an allowed "built-in headroom" which they call overclocking and not real overclocking.
Real enthusiasts can still overclock, the lockdowns simply stop morons like me breaking hardware then trying RMA's.
Point is Intel/AMD lets you adjust voltage clocks and power in software that grants you the maximum performance easily while Nvidia doesn't.
Nvidia allow you to overclock. Some AIB's allow over volting, some allow higher power limits.
Too many part time, risk averse noobs want guaranteed warranty on tampered products. The real enthusiasts know they're risking losing hardware.
Elmor is a proper enthusiast but 99% + of end users are not. That's who Nvidia and Intel sell to. Not sure why he didn't have a stab at AMD. Ryzen may be unlocked but it's not OC friendly.
This is the port layout of the GA-Z77N-WIFI
And this is the GA-Z270N-WIFI
So over a period of around five years, the only feature change is the addition of a USB-C port. Ok, so the to HDMI ports swapped places with the DVI port (which lost analogue support) and the connectors for the Wi-Fi, but so what?
Sure, the actual boards have some changes, like an M.2 slot for an SSD, the Wi-Fi card is M.2 rather than mini PCIe and the overall board layout has improved, but in terms of the complete feature set, little has changed.
Admittedly this is not limited to Gigabyte, it's an industry wide thing. Compared to the "happy" 00's and the time before then, there's almost no innovation due to the industry having shifted focus, as making PC parts is simply not profitable any more.
On the other hand, I don't understand the Taiwanese board makers that offer 10 different models that only differ in terms of one or two features. It doesn't make economical or logistical sense to offer so many SKUs. I doubt most consumers would care if a motherboard is $10 extra because they get a set of six audio connectors instead of three and an HDMI port, rather than none. However, these are the type of differences there often are between SKUs.
I miss companies like Abit, AOpen, DFI, EPoX, Chaintech, Soyo and dare I say, even Jetway. At times, they all came up with things that no-one had done before. Abit was way ahead of its time in many ways, such as removing all legacy ports, which didn't quite work at the time. AOpen made boards with tube amplifiers for the audio, but sadly used crappy Realtek audio chips that made it quite pointless. DFI had the most advanced BIOS options ever seen, although maybe not always the most stable BIOS releases. EPoX tried a lot of new things, most of them never really took, but at least they tried. Chaintech was also willing to try new things, although that noise little 20mm fan I had at the rear I/O on a board was not a hit. Soyo made some rather good and stylish silver boards. Even Jetway has had a few unique products over the years.
Now it's all about who can put the most RGB bling on the boards, a feature I turn off fairly quickly, as it's not my thing. Yes, it's nice that it's an option, but it's something that's adding a lot of cost to the boards and motherboards have never been more expensive than now. Even basic "performance" chipset boards are easily starting at $150 these days, whereas not too long ago, they started at around $100. The "bundles" you get these days aren't worth to be called bundles, as you don't even get a full set of SATA cables. It would be nice to get the drivers on a USB drive rather than a CD for one, as I haven't had an optical drive in a system for at least a handful of years by now.
The industry is really struggling and in as much as Elmor is concerned about the overclocking potential, it's not the only thing that's suffering. My past couple of Intel based boards (both from Gigabyte) have been fairly unstable and it felt like they were never quite finished off from a UEFI perspective. My new Asus board (and Ryzen processor) has so far, been very stable, which is quite a surprise to me. At the same time, I feel like I was cheated, as it's missing a fair few overclocking features that Asus' ROG board has, but they decided to gimp on this board in favour of flashy LEDs. I know which I would've preferred. On the upside, we're getting vastly better chipset and power regulation these days, no more plastic push pins, which is at least something.
Overall it just feels like there isn't enough competition with three major players in the motherboards industry, as sadly ASRock isn't a full-on competitor, Biostar, well, they just seem to be available in some markets and ECS seems to be on the way out of the consumer space. With Asus, Gigabyte and MSI left, we're stuck in a situation where we have, as mentioned in the article, companies that are only doing just enough to stay on the same level as their competitors, but nothing much more. :(
But still no Nvidia cards have any performance advantage from each other short of a slightly higher powerlimit and some lower temps. And no not a single one allow a higher voltage. All are stuck at 1.093v so they all overclock the same in the end. I would be happier if they have an unlocked bios that voids the warranty if you used it. I just hate how they're actively BLOCKING software based overclocking.
Your point is reflected in my purchases. 780ti Classified, then another, 980ti Kingpin, 1080ti FE (lesson learned). No point buying an AIB bling version.
Really the problem, as elmor would seem to want to call it, isn't about the "bling", its that there are two very distinct types of PC enthusiasts; those that like to overclock, and those that like to play videogames and know nothing about OC. These two users have very different hardware needs, and most brands do not release specific products that cater to each's needs; rather they try to do both, because some misguided person told them that it was possible.
This is actually part of why I gave the ASRock X370 Taichi a perfect score; sure there are boards with more features for that platform, but are they needed? Or even wanted? A line had to be drawn in the sand as to what is too excessive, and merely "ticking feature boxes", rather than effectively removing features that aren't needed by a user, and replacing them with different features for this other type of user... yet as mentioned, because of how things are "locked down" at this point, I do understand that making these differences obvious isn't that easy. So my job of a reviewer isn't easier... it is definitely harder... how can I say a product with tonnes of OC-centric features is built for a normal user, when it is plain it isn't? And why do OC-centric products have all these gaming-focused features?
If you're gonna play the "im honest i swear" card, then a hardmod that is super well documented should be no issue.
And for people that don't OC sure it's no big deal and sure OC isn't exactly the most efficient way but it's a hobby and it's a passion for a lot of people to push their hardware to the limit and extract as much performance as possible. These kinds of people (read: me included) don't mind losing warranties and the "just solder and hardmod" argument doesn't work since we don't all know how to solder or even want to hardmod our hardware just to do something that should've been possible through software.
I'm sure there are a lot of enthusiasts out there like me that are more than a little pissed since this rule put by Nvidia also stops over the top overclocking cards (Classified, Kingpin, Lightning, Matrix...etc.) from popping up since Nvidia doesn't allow it anymore and also because the companies aren't allowed to modify boost voltage or power beyond what Nvidia allows making such designs useless. Which is sad because Nvidia makes the best architecture and has the top performing chips right now.
Ironically you might not win any benchmarks, but at least you have stuck to your guns.
It is interesting you include MSI in there, wouldn't they have to make a card for XOC for it to matter :roll:
The industry has gone a curious way. They all seem the same to me, with a different color. I want some innovation...please.