As someone that used to be a tech writer/journalist for over a decade, the motherboard industry is boring these days. There's no innovation any more, only minor improvements or iterations. One of the best examples is Gigabyte's mini-ITX boards.
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.
