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 need Owen to start a crusade against my local council.
Remember you are also arguing with someone who consistently swaps what brand is at use and quite honestly hates them both. Both companies have huge flaws, but I'll take boost 3.0 nonsense over black screens.
You think I don't switch brands as well? Oh I was an Nvidia user before this bullcrap. I never said AMD has no flaws, merely pointing out Nvidia's GPU "boost" is flawed and extremely prohibitive to overclocking.
And I did read what buildzoid wrote. One of his cards black screens the other doesn't. So 50/50 shot, or set a boost bin lower. I mean we aren't really comparing apples and oranges here.
And I'm on mobile I have no idea what your specs are nor do I care. Why would I? I have an ATI logo for my freaking user profile. Quite honestly I have learned red pretty openly on this forum for over 10 years. Right now? AMD can't seem to get their collective heads out of their collective asses to release a product on time.
Again im going by how you reacted to my posts.
Let me say the dimm2 slot is innovative... but to what end? What does it really give us? Wow, you moved the location of m.2 slots. Hey look... an "x" shaped board...another aesthetic feature.
The reality is, ALL AIBs, this includes asus, have gone down the path of cloning boards off each other. Got realtek alc, check. Got onboard leds/headers and software to control it, check. Have a robust enough (doesnt take much, you know this) vrm to handle ambient overclocking, check. Got an intel or killer nic, check. Have a bios with entirely too many options for the average overclocker, check.
What are reviewers supposed to review?? Most of them cover 95% of what 99% of enthusiasts need to know. So yes, it is hard to fail a board when everything works just like the other 100 options from AIBs...
So what do you want to see you believe is missing from the majority of reviews? What should we 'ding' boards for which may spur TRUE innovation?
Am I missing something?
While I agree with elmor on it's views about the industry I think his board, the CROSSHAIR VI hero, is a piece o garbage.
Why ? I have lived with this board for a few months now, have tried every bios build, every bios "feature" and setting combination. I can testify that this board is bellow the X370 Taichi on every single regard but LEDs:
Platform feel unstable, there is definitly something wrong with it.
REF CLK adjustments are really unstable with the asus.
SMT could not be properly disabled till closed bios 1401 eg: you could not get to higher clocks with SMT off and even at low clock speeds the system was really unstable - the X370 taichi always worked like a champ in that regard.
Memory support- you can get to high clocks, being stable at higher clocks is another history and again, the X370 Taichi feels much better using the same CPU and memory.
SUPREME FX is pretty much the only feature that could put this board on the same league as with the X370 Taichi. The C6H supreme FX panel comes with a DTS tab under it's software, has a optical out. Now, all of sudden, ASUS stated that it does not support DTS or DD anymore. I call SCAM on this one.
So, you want a led full and trouble full motherboard for your new ryzen build ? Get yourself the ASUS CROSSHAIR VI HERO
rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?93551-Dolby-DTS-DD-on-Windows-10-15063-332-How-When&p=658818&posted=1#post658818
Have you compared your C6H to anything else ? Like, you comparing it ?
So what would you like to see??
Software is really the biggest Achilles heel right now, and just because everyone has software doesn't mean that it's actually working well. Did you see the latest call outs on the X299 VRMs? Why did no reviews find or mention this? I saw at least some writing that the state of the boards is quite bad due to the performance/power consumption issue but that's just because it affected what they usually do. As I'm working in the motherboard R&D, I know that if you look deeper you're going to find several issues with a lot of them. Of course every board works out of the box, but if you look through the forums you'll see how many different issues customers have with the boards from any brand. They fly through reviews getting multiple awards, and then the customers have to find all the problems. Asus and other vendors are able to launch products which still would need several months of development work because the only one who's going to complain is the end user bitching about it on forums. The reviews are important to the manufacturers which means the reviewers have a lot of power. It's sadly a sellout fest in that area.
I mean, let me make a TPU board, and it will sell. You will have a hard time meeting my needs, and what I want isn't exactly what you get from those other reviewers, because I don't give a flying fuck about money; I want my hobby, the thing I enjoy, to be something I can continue to enjoy for years to come. That's why my opinion might differ sometimes compared to those others. I wanna have fun, not pay my bills.
Like you asked me, why give the Taichi a 10/10? The fact you even have to ask, to me, says how out of touch you my be with your true customer base. That may sound harsh, but dude, I want things to be better, too.
Then there are examples like this news post, where TPU mentions the Gigabyte and MSI boards failing, but nothing about Asus where are all clearly called out in the video? Goes well next to the Asus banner to the right. www.techpowerup.com/234744/intel-x299-platform-called-a-vrm-disaster-by-overclocker-der8auer
Why do you think I'm out of touch with customers? The Taichi might be a good board considering the alternatives, but 10/10?
That said, i didnt see any throttling in my testing on the z299 Prime dx when using p95 with avx (4ghz all c/t). Vrm heatsink was warm for sure. Now, 4.5ghz aida64 test, same thing.. vrm was very warm, but i didnt catch any throttling. Do recall though, i posted a month ago to you, so x299 wasnt in the picture. NOW youll want a more robust board for pushing x299...otherwise these boards are really still all about the same for 90% of people.
I simply listed the first two boards presented in the video. I didn't want to list them all, because according to the video, EVERY brand fell flat and it would have been a long list. I did point out no launch boards passed in the article, however.
I can't be bought either. If ASUS came to me with a bag of money asking for a 10/10, the first thing I'd do is write an article about industry ethics.
Like, there might (MIGHT), be better boards, but, better at what? And those things they are better at, are they worth the added cost?
A bar has to be set where things are perfect, and when things are over the top. And any board for the AM4 platform, to me, that oversteps what the Taichi offers, is doing too much, and as such, isn't as good.
I criticize products for doing too much, all the time. Like boards for both gaming, and hardcore OC; to me, those are different users. That's the ROG product line through and through though. That doesn't mean those boards don't have a place, because they do for sure, and part of that is because people LIKE to go over the top. But how do you know when you reach the summit, and then want to keep reaching?
Think back to when we were all hanging out on XS... what made things fun then, and isn't here now?
Maybe my ideas are simply too grand in scale. :P