ASRock Wants the Best Mobo Ideas in the World

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I would love to see at least one USB, SATA(preferably a few), and firewire(not as essential anymore) header closer to the top of the board for the front panel connections/optical drives. This would help achieve better cable management and avoid stretching cables on larger cases.

Some sort of re-enforced PCI express slot would also be ideal. Graphics cards are becoming longer and heavier and that puts a large amount of stress on the MB and the slot itself. A bracket that could secure to the hard drive cages could work well.

This wouldn't be a direct part of the board itself, but include a small flash drive that contains software specifically for flashing the BIOS. BIOS updates could be downloaded automatically and would replace the older versions on the flash drive.

Since most CPU coolers use a similar mounting style (usually screws, which I greatly prefer to the push-pins) a mounting back plate could come included, or preferably, pre-installed on the back of the MB. Since some might plan on using more exotic cooling (liquid N2 and such) this back plate should be screwed in to the board, or use double sided tape reminiscent of 3M strips so it is easily removed.
 
I would like to see the memory slots moved to the back of the motherboard and stacked like in laptops. This will allow you to place them closer (directly below) to the CPU and decrease memory latency. This will directly increase performance and make latency critical applications like real-time ray tracing more feasible.
 
1. Put redundant headers on the motherboard for front panel access (3rd party, or sell a nice front panel with the MB). Without sufficient connectors (especially USB and audio) some users have to use physical plugs to the rear of the PC, and thread them up through the PC. I want enough internal headers that I can connect front USB ports (preferably 3.0, and at least 2 and maybe up to 6) in addition to the USB ports on the back. I also want a multicard reader, external SATA connector, and maybe some temperature and other operating gauges on one or more front panels. Even if I have to use a bios switch to use the same port for only front or back of the machine that would be ok, as long as they aren't all forcibly stuck on the back only. If they were switchable you would have to include an LED indicator on each port to show which ones were 'active'/live.

2. Two desktop monitors are becoming the standard (if they aren't already) for non-gaming desktop work. If someone wants to game at the high end, they will buy a high-end card, but for those of us who can live with most of the built-in MB functionality, don't make us buy a video card just to have our second monitor. In fact, consider making an add-on card that will allow an additional 2 monitors for a total of 4(I wouldn't build the MB with 4, because that isn't as common). There are plenty of power users (people who want fast technology) who aren't gamers.

3. Virtual machines are becoming more and more common. Software has to deal with much of the machine management, but consider how your design maximizes the usability of multiple concurrent machines. If I have one virtual machine running heavy calculations, another rendering some graphics, and I'm using a third for surfing while waiting for the other two, how does the physical hardware support these operations through available cache for allocation, for example if multiple machines are running off the same drive, then they have to share and are limited by the drive cache; maybe make additional cache available that is assignable per virtual machine so that the user's perception of performance isn't affected by shared HD access (in my current configuration I just have a boatload of drives so each machine has a separate one)

4. Included internal USB (3.0) adapters that connect the MB pinouts (see #1, above) to a female adapter, so if I want to put a permanent USB drive (like for readyboost) inside my case to keep it out of the way, I can do so without having to buy or make my own adapter.

 
For me, It's hr little things, like not having capacitors between the pci slots, which make it harder to route cables. Packaging a decent, relevant set of cables, like three or four sata cables, and maybe one of those blocks that Asus uses for their front panel connectors. I hate cases that have separate connectors for the power, reset, and LED's, we have a standard for that, please use it. Copious amounts of PWM fan headers, especially on your micro-ATX boards. Some of us still like being able to use BIOS level controls for our case fans. The layout of the rear panel is also critical in an everyday way. having eight USB ports doesn't do you any good when they're all bunched up, and can be blocked by a large device like a cell modem. Esata is nice, making it hot-swap is vital though. In this day and age, we can safely deep-six the floppy connector, now that all of the mainstream OS'es support flash drives. An internal USB type A connector would be immensely useful for anyone who wants to do a instant on type deal, or mount their wireless card internally. Placing the memory slots too close to the socket can make life difficult for those of us who use memory with tall heat-spreaders and a large air-cooler. It's the little things that separate a good motherboard from the great one one you actually buy.
 
my perfect motherboard, high end segment or low-end must be a flexible platformand i mean:
1.MB must permit you to give a personal touch (ex to add a chipset fan or a fan for every heatsink.
2.it has protection for power surge from power supply
3.a good connectivity for all the peripherals (you never know when you need it)
4.i wish to find some colors different from other manufactures (ex: the mb from above looks like MSI blend-it with Gigabyte
5.always robust components
6.long term driver support at least for models who was sold very good (you have it but keep up the good work)
8 must have something unique when you lunch a new series of MB
We are all the same but some of us have violet eyes (elizabeth taylor)
and the list is endless but this is good news! you have choices
keep up the good work guys !


I buy and will buy after this wishes
 
[citation][nom]ZaKa[/nom]Integrated mini-SSD onboard to install the OS.[/citation]
that is some creative-ass thinking man. maybe you should work for companies like this 😉
 
Nice well this is a very nice question, to start, a motherboard made with the best quality possible like military components. Second, On board excellent quality 6 port real hardware Raid for levels 0/1/5/6 sata and sas compatible of course independent from normal chipset controller I just need to have raid available without searching for add ons. Third decent audio chipset separated from system memory, with 4 independent inputs 2 in 2 out beside the 8.1 speaker output so that no matter the intensive task always work flawlessly. Fourth self test Bios, to be rapidly certain if all my hardware is OK or any compatibleness problems. fifth memory slots, to be able to upgrade to 48GB ram if needed (off course motherboard support for this), and that it wil alow interchangeable sizes in triple or dual channel, like 6Gb crucial in Channel A and 12 Gb kingston in channel B full compatibility granted. Sixth 4x PCIexpress real x16 slots, and normal workstation slots. seventh More ports, like two firewire 800, two firewire 400, all usb ports 3.0 compliant, 2 eSata from the hardware raid controller mentioned above, audio in optional add on with four analog inputs like 2xPLUG and 2xRCA, lcd 5 1/2 bay size with temps, frequencies, temps power consumption.
Optional pcmcia input and multicard imput also.

Excelent chipset cooling solution to keep at maximum 40º c.
No flopy or ide support forget that.

And at last but not least, one included SSD 100GB for OS.
And I will pay for this $767.00 dll
 
I want legacy support stopped in high-performance motherboards. Just dump IDE, floppy, VGA, PCI slots, and Firewire support completely. Many performance users don't need 'em, don't want 'em, and wish they'd just go away. If people decide they need/want support for such devices, create a PCI-E x1/x4 daughter board they can buy separately for $25 or so to support such devices.

Is there any particular reason why ATX & mATX boards can't use SO-DIMMS to save space?

Re-position USB, Audio & S/PDIF, and FP headers to where the main power or SATA connectors are usually positioned currently. There's nothing pretty about having to run cables over a large, high-end graphics card (or two+) to reach those headers. Centralize stuff like that. (It might be good to leave one USB header towards the rear for those who opt to use card-slot ports, though.)

Move the main power connector above the DIMM slots. Get it away from the front of the board, and bend the thing 90-degrees like front-facing SATA connectors.

Slot layout... High-performance boards should have 3 slots between PCI-E x16 slots, even on triple SLI/CrossFire boards. Airflow is a key ingredient to the longevity of such parts. Give us one or two PCI-E x1 or x4 slots above all the others to accommodate.

Pay or reward me if you use any of my ideas :)
 
I want a motherboard without the useless crap. Hardly anyone uses IDE, serial, floppy, ps2, maybe even pci is a bit outdated. Replace those with more useful features like more usb ports and such. Also, i think that the sound card should come on a separate pcb connected via pcie like majority of the high end boards for better audio quality and allow for more customization. Another usefull feature would be a lot of LED's on the mainboard that can light up the entire board for easy installation and modification in the dark. The lights should have an on/off switch so it does not have to be on all the time. A really interesting feature that COULD be used is have 2 cpu sockets, one for a high end cpu and one for a ultra power savings for when the computer is idle. Something like have a socket 1356 and micro-FCBGA8 559 for an atom processor for when high processing power is not needed. This could become a new ultra power saving platform that can still be a high end gaming board. Another useful tool is something similar to the ROG connect, but more useful in the sense where you can see power consumption and voltages of the individual components in your system.
and last but not least, it should have an extremely wide QVL for ddr3 ram. i know this may be asking a lot but its extremely hard to find ram that is 100% supported by the motherboard which always leads to BSOD's
 
I'd like a fan speed controller integrated right onto the board, or even just adding an ASROCK fan speed controller / temperature monitor thing that you could toss into a 5.25" or 3.5" bay.

Secondly, my particular board pulsates red, and glows green, blue and orange... It's really ugly in an all blue-lit case. Customizable LED lighting (with a switch / BIOS option) would be handy. Not for the budget boards - but for some medium / high-end ones.

Last but not least - and I don't know if this is feasible or not - but having different color-schemed boards would be handy. Nice looking motherboards seem to be somewhat rare.
 
1. My first want is to be able to have an HDMI port for sound! I have a 7.1 channel surround sound system, and I am only running coaxial from my HT Omega Striker 7.1. This means I can only get 5.1 channel. With my nvidia cards there's no way for me to get 7.1 channel without purchasing seriously overpriced soundcards. Even if it's passthrough, that's ok, my receiver can do the work, just get it there somehow.

2. Change the placement of USB and audio headers, these should be more towards the right side of the motherboard. More than likely up towards the top. It is such a pain to get cables down to the bottom left of the motherboard sometimes.

3. The 8 pin CPU connectors and the 24-pin connectors should be at 90 degrees with the motherboard, as the SATA connectors commonly are.

4. Instant on features on every motherboard. At least general tasks such as email and music shouldn't need full boot. And perhaps even full internet on instant boot. Computers are amazing, we shouldn't need to wait minutes to get to such basic tasks.

5. More PCI-E lanes! Put as many on there as you possible can. If I'm running quadfire or quad sli I want full 16x on all of those slots, and more! I want my raid controller to be in a 16x slot too. Heat is not a problem, we can watercool!

6. It has to have usb 3.0 and Sata 3.

7. We want trim support for SSDs IN raid. It can be done! And people will love you if you do it.

8. It's nice to have the IO panel extender, that little piece that you can attach your LED and power button plugs in to, and then attach that to the motherboard. Makes life easy.

9. Perhaps a Pump header, which has a strict function of being used to detect a pumps RPMs and monitor it. It could obviously act as a fan header as well, but perhaps you could find a way to add something more? Flow rate? An attachment that will have to be added to a loop, so you can get real time flow rate, temperature of water etc. This could be VERY valuable.
 
First off no more puke colors, I don't need a thousand colors on my mobo making it ugly when I just dropped 200 bucks for it. Stick to two-tone colors that look great. Second Keep all power cables, sata ports, and usb ports to one side. Third a motherboard that can lock in like a one push button on coolermaster case, like little metal buttons or copper ones lining the edges of the board. Fourth being that the buttons lock it down it should be able to swivel so that my wires from my power supply can be easier to hide or organize than in one place. Fifth use led lights to indicate where a problem is or a mini LCD screen scrolling the problem for us over-clockers, otherwise have the screen giving us our temperatures for everything, clock speed on CPU, and power consumption. Sixth like someone said no more legacy stuff. Everything is high-end and if no one wants to build it they can go find scrap material elsewhere. We gamers and enthusiast and computer geek freaks want the best and we usually pay top-dollar for all of it. We want the latest and greatest ( mutiple *more than 3* usb 3.0 hdmi, and 3 newest versions of pcie Ex for best performance with multiple cards) in our computer and why should we be held back by old folks. Seventh why not have ram lanes near the pcie ex lanes? ram is so thin anyway and we have no room with them near the CPU with a over hanging cooler on it. Eighth Make it neat, organized, cool, useful, new, the best, make it not to fit the case but the the buyers, we can move stuff around the mobo but we want the mobo to move around our stuff.
 
I want to be able to run 2 OSs on one motherboard with one CPU, but implemented in hardware not software. Give me 2 cores of my 4 core CPU for Windows and 2 cores for another OS, at the same time. I will stuff in 2 separate hard drives and 2 separate video cards and 8 GB of memory.
 
So I have two designs and they are both PICTURES! I find it hard to describe something the way I want with words, easier if I show it.

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So the first layout is Tri-SLI and Tri-CFX compatible with spacing between each video card for more air in-take. The PCI-E 8x slots can be used for sound cards, video capture cards, solid state discs or if they were open ended possible single slot 9800 GTs for PhysX.

Both layouts feature a lower 24-Pin power connector to be closer to the PSU with cases with bottom mounted PSUs. Moving the 24-Pin allowed for the RAM slots to be moved closer to the edge of the board for greater compatibility between giant CPU coolers and tall RAM heat spreaders.
 
1. A smaller motherboard than just itx
2. A pci-e slot that (on itx) doesn't require the GPU to hang over the mobo, meaning move the pci-e slot in towards the cpu more, (easier to build smaller powerful computer's)
3. Memory slots next to pci slots and chipset where memory is, that way a chipset cooler isn't sandwiched between cpu cooler and big add in cards (only important on some motherboards)
4.Cable managment built in to the motherboard (you heard me) holes in the motherboard by the pci-e slots for pci-e power controllers. A sideways 24pin, and either a hole by the 4pin power or put it next to the edge.
 
I would like to see:

1. Universal EFI support,
2. Ram slots further from the cpu socket.
3. Onboard power, reset, and clear cmos buttons.
4. The ability to control all of the fan headers by voltage from the bios.
5. It would also be handy to have a minipcie slot, as I find laptop wifi cards are more common and better supported than their usb or pci counterparts.
6. More robust power circuitry on mATX boards.

These should all have been standard long ago!
 
Add a special button on the back panel to switch into the bios without restarting the computer, and have the changes take place when you push the button to switch back into your OS.
 
[citation][nom]ruili[/nom]Strip It! Simplify! I want a motherboard designed for those of us that embrace new technology. I want to see the first motherboard with no legacy crap on it. No IDE(pata), floppy, serial, VGA/D-sub, firewire(its dead jim), PCI, PS2 ports. I want 1 bloody video port standard! Somebody just pick one already! I won't buy another MB with 3 different video ports! I want USB 3. Work with AMD and get that crap stripped from the chipsets too. There has got to be some performance advantage to not have chipsets and motherboards designed around legacy junk tech. People who don't want to upgrade away from 10 year old CRTs, IDE CD burners and their massive collection of porn on 3.5" floppies have plenty of motherboards to choose from already.(A real sound chip would be nice too)[/citation]

PCI cards are still common. It isn't like PCI is on the verge of dying. I know PCI-e 1x is becoming more and more of a standard but I personally wouldn't buy a board without at least 1 pci slot on it (Unless it was like those high end EVGA ones)
 
In general, my request is to aim for a high-quality cheaper board for mainstream users. My suggestions:
-Integrate storage onto the motherboard (~20GB or so) for the OS install, system updates, etc.
-Minimize the number of ports, especially old ones, to help cut down on cost/price. Like ruili said, hardly anyone buys a new motherboard looking to use outdated technology.
-Include the latest interfaces (USB 3.0, SATA 3, etc.), though it's not necessary to have 12 of each one. There are always high-end enthusiast boards out there that have tons of ports for people with 8 HDD's in RAID, etc., but you would be hard-pressed to find one that only has 2, which is as many as the majority of users would need. And if necessary, expansion slots are always an option.
-Keep the board small. Again, it is not difficult to find a huge board with dozens of ports, but to have a small one with all the necessities and nothing superfluous at a low cost would sell like hotcakes, guaranteed. Plus, small boards fit into almost all cases, big boards require big cases.
-Stay away from integrating too much into the motherboard itself (i.e. bluetooth, wireless, infrared, etc.) because this drives up the cost of the board, but is not necessary for all users and can easily be added on through a USB port or PCI slot.

All in all, my suggestion is to simplify. Limit material usage on features that are unnecessary and drive down the cost.
 
Basic functionality. Video cards are powerful enough that 1 or 2 will handle anything thrown at them. Design a MB that will allow the addition of aftermarket cards such as a sound card and a nic card. A well built MB imo would have two pcie 2.1 16 slots at the top spaced for dual coolers and then two pci 16 for legacy cards with maybe an additional couple of 1x or 4x as I believe you can put a 1x into a 4x or a 16x. I do not see the point of 3 and 4 slots for cards except for the extreme user. 1 5970 or Nv 480 will kill anything out there and two, well I like to dream. a pair of XXXX ATI or XXX Nv would be as good or in some cases better than a single card. So why have any more than 2 slots? Let the after market in so people can put more than just video cards on the MB. My case in point is a sound card, once you have listened to movies and games through a sound card vs on board, you never use on board sound again. I am sure that there are more cards out there then sound and nic, but what use are they if you can't put them on the MB? Dual bios is a must as well. It doesn't even have to be super high end components, just solid quality will do fine. A board that can be used by the majority of people but more importantly they can put all of their stuff on it and not have to choose what they can't carry over or what they can do without.
 
Three things:

-factory MB water cooling
-USB 3.0 header for the front panel
-USB 3.0 connector onboard for ReadyBoost so the flash drive would be semi-permanently mounted on the motherboard
 
What I want in a motherboard is motherboard with OS overclocking software made for the motherboard. A lot of motherboards already would have this but it'd be nice for it to be made for your next mobos.

I want a CMOS reset button that works like the 890FX Deluxe4 CMOS reset button. It'll make hassles like taking out the battery and switching jumpers so much easier. Your mobo has it already, but just continue it.

Another thing I'd want you to consider is the BIOS troubleshoot LED, to be honest it actually helps.

I want both 90 and 180 degree SATA ports for the choice to go 90 or 180 degree for cable management.

I want the motherboard to be able to use SATA 6 and 3 if that's possible so that I can be future proofed but also be able to use my older drives.

The last thing I want, I want the mobo, gimmie. 😀
 
1) replace all plugs (USB, SPDIF, Firewire, etc) with a single plug that connects to an external brick. This brick holds all these connections.
2) use the space this makes at the rear of the card to space out the PCI ports. As it is, you cannot use all the ports on the back of a PC due to crowding.
3) develop a usable wifi display transmitter to connect to HTPCs...and add a coax port to make it even more useful.
4) program a hotkey to allow the user to adjust bios settings WHILE BOOTED in the OS! No more forgetting to press delete repeatedly.
5) Perhaps even a emulation of booting with the changed settings?
6) This has already been done by some companies, but provide little adapters that you can hold in your hand to connect all the case wires/jumpers to and then simply plug in to the case. Simplifies removal/replacement of mobo.
7) improve the visibility of the board. better labeling and color blockades could be used to draw the installers eyes to the appropriate section. Think of how much easier things got with PS/2 and speaker/mic plugs when they started using the pastel green/pink colors.

Things others have mentioned that I think are good ideas:
1) integrated SSD for restoration of OS
2) integrated wifi & bluetooth
3) better cable management. Put all plugs from case/PSU on periphery...you could even experiment with putting them on the BACK of the mobo??
4) strip legacy support to free space for the above
5) upgrade the interface/user-friendliness of BIOS.
6) improve installation process, i.e. CPU/fan installation (always the scariest part), and maybe screwless or thumb-screw attachment of mobo to cases
7) automate OCing and allow more diagnostic testing pre-OS boot
 
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