ASRock Wants the Best Mobo Ideas in the World

[iam2thecrowe]

I would like to see a motherboard built for overclocking that utilises a drive bay for a control panel. The control panel should be able to adjust voltages/fsb speeds on the fly and have presets which you can select between as needed. Possibly even fan speed control built in. Basically a more extravagant version of the old "turbo" button. Also a well designed, similar control panel, but a software version. I know these already exist, but they arent very good. Something like MSI's "afterburner" GPU tool, but for the motherboard, would be perfect. Also Ditch the old BIOS and replace with Extensible Firmware Interface.

 

[jojesa]

I would like to see a motherboard that goes thru POST in five seconds or less.
These days it takes a system almost the same time to POST than loading the operating system.
With fast SSD becoming mainstream, I don’t want to spend 10 to 12 seconds waiting for a mobo to POST.
After pressing the power button, it takes my system 31 seconds to load Windows 7. If I subtract the 11 seconds POSTing then I could save more than 3.73 hours a year.
I could put my system to sleep but I like to turn off all peripherals when not in use.

 

[asgallant]

I would like a microATX board designed for use in a low-profile HTPC case, supporting:
■Low-power mobile processors (next gen AMD Zacate or Intel Huron River chips)
■SO-DIMM RAM slots
■At least one mini-PCI connector (maybe two, if possible); consider pre-populating the slot with an 802.11n card and mounting antennas on the back-panel
■HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort connectors
■Replace standard Realtek-style audio chipset with higher quality chipset (ex: Creative Labs X-Fi [with custom drivers only, ala Auzentech, as Creative's are crap] or ASUS Xonar) capable of bitstreaming all audio sources over HDMI/DisplayPort (games, music, movies, etc)
■Add a back-panel ExpressCard slot
■Get rid of all the legacy connectors (IDE, floppy, FireWire, D-Sub, DVI, PS2 ports, etc), and use the extra space to more advantageously place SATA ports, front panel, FP audio, USB, and power connectors
■Consider mounting only USB 3 and SATA 3 ports, if a reasonable quantity (say, at least six of each) can be provided without substantially increasing the price
■Layout PCIe slots (from top to bottom) x4/x1/x1/x16 or x4/x1/x16/x1 to minimize overlap problems with double-slot graphics cards
■Replace BIOS with EFI and add LBA64 support for >2TB HDD's.
■Optimize board components and EFI for power efficiency rather than overclocking
■Stand behind the board quality with a minimum 3 year warranty

 

[hereIam]

I would like current or future generation technology (usb3, sata3, pcie2, intel lightpeak, pcie3...). 4 way sli and crossfire, with placements so that the gpu's don't obscure other pci and pcie1 slots. multiple bios switches, so that we can switch between different overclocks. possibly integrated bluetooth and wifi (3g or wireless m if at all possible). also give it a bit of style, I'm sad to say i bought my asus republic of gamers. find a good color scheme and use the heat sinks to make an awesome design. If you could keep the atx form, so that it can actually fit into most cases, also if you could keep your relatively low entry price that would be awesome!

also I saw someone throw the idea of having a small ssd on the board to load the os. (this is not my idea) But i like his idea a lot.

 

[dimar]

A good motherboard should have a diagnostic/stress tool built into a BIOS, like somebody pointed already, but:
It also should include power management tests such as stressing the cycling between different power states of (mboard, cpu, ram, cards...), with voltage/current and other information logs... To see how power supply handles it all.

Another idea is to create space in the bios, or integrate a special diagnostic flash memory, and get manufacturers to create diagnostic utilities for their hardware, in a state of a small firmware updates for this area of flash memory. There should be a user rating and feedback for every update/utility. This might force manufacturers to use higher quality components too.

The main priority should ALWAYS be using the highest quality/tested components/equipment.

A BIOS option/jumpers, where we can completely cut the power to unused components/ports would be nice.

 

[blbec]

1) ZERO support for legacy devices, meaning no FDD, no PATA, no PCI. There is little reason for an enthusiast board to have any of this stuff. PATA connections takes up alot of space.

2) Double wide lanes for the PCIex16 lanes. Any high end video card is going to use it up for cooling. Bragging about lots of PCI/PCIex1 slots is useless when they are all taken up by the PCIex16. This is partly why I don't want any PCI slots. Just give me a lot of usable PCIex1 slots.

 

[blbec]

1) ZERO support for legacy devices, meaning no FDD, no PATA, no PCI. There is little reason for an enthusiast board to have any of this stuff. PATA connections takes up alot of space.

2) Double wide lanes for the PCIex16 lanes. Any high end video card is going to use it up for cooling. Bragging about lots of PCI/PCIex1 slots is useless when they are all taken up by the PCIex16. This is partly why I don't want any PCI slots. Just give me a lot of usable PCIex1 slots.

 

[dEAne]

It's important for me to see small lights on the motherboard to make sure parts are inserted properly thereby shorten troubleshooting tasks a bit.
How about a way of changing those screws so when I replace it with custom heat-sinks or cooler I could incorporate it easily. Spacing for CPU slots and memory is very important too.

There are enthusiast, gamers, novice users, etc. how about for gamers or enthusiast having motherboard versions without the PATA or IDE, floppy or old SATA slots instead incorporate the troubleshooting circuits to display voltages, temperatures, etc.

There should also a version (limited) for video editors that will incorporate firewire, SPDIF, PCI X for audio options. How about a PCI e option for SSD bootable OS.

 

[sacre]

Alrighty, lets see here. How about making the Motherboard a different Shape? Or even have the placement of the North/Southbridge different than the standard motherboard. The "Neo 2 Platinum" from MSI nearly had it when the ram was situated above the CPU. Re situating everything might even lead to performance increases for all you know, and on top of that it'll add to the look being a "Unique" board.

2 - Like others have said, remove the pointless things. No, we don't want Firewire, no we don't want IDE, etc. Make it USB3 compatible of course, Esata, and a must is that ALL ports have to be PCIe 16, no more "PCI" slots. PCIe is the future.

3 - Back to cosmetics, like previously stated light up the slots. Simple LED's, Red LEDS light up the slots that aren't in use and Blue light up the slots in use. (or w/e color best suited for you). Lights lights and more lights is where its at. But, add an option to remove the lighting so that those who want a dark moment for a game can toggle the lighting off.

Make it support both ATV and nVidia of course, Support the top speed DDR3 Ram, make it support the socket 1336 (so for future I9's).

To clear the clutter of cables, the power connections should be either near the top, on the right edge (very edge) or on the very bottom.

The Northbridge/Southbridge heatsinks of course need to be flashy. So make them large, and colored to create that whole feeling of epic.

On board OC'ing, on board bios reset, reset, power, etc. LED display on the board to display current temperatures, clocks, power consumption.

And to top the cake, make the bios flashy. Not the basic "blue with yellow words". If possible, make it designed, so when you're in there OC'ing and people are watching it looks good.

 

[Guest]

Hi
I have just three things I want.
One make a quality board and stand behind it!! for at least 3 years with free round trip shipping!

Two like every one else said trop the legacy connectors....

Three sata3 usb3 3double spaced pciex16slots that do sli and crossfire

 

[johnyar]

How about an option through your website to "customize" your own mobo. Let the user pick which features they want/need and leave the rest of the clutter at home. This would also help you to discern which features are important to include on your mass mobos based on the popularity of each feature on the custom orders.

Physical and bios/os customizable overclock switch with an obvious on/off. Similar to light switch, of course smaller, and with an indicator light.

 

[Gin Fushicho]

A long heat sink attached to my chipset and other parts that can come out of the back of my computer tower like the one here. http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff4/Drudicta/Public%20Album/DSCN0708.jpg

For more silent cooling and just plain old better cooling.

Either that or a sound card built specifically for the motherboard.


I think the internal to external chipset heatsink is really classy though, and it's kept my chipset far cooler than any fan ever has.

Exclusive software to overclock your hardware while still in windows is nice too. BIOS overclock, not just the cruddy "overclocked MHz" without the overvolting and everything else.

 

[marraco]

I want to connect a network cable, and switch by software between crossed and straight configuration.

Any motherboard package should include a transparent sheet with the same form and size of the motherboard, with screw holes on the same place, to check if the screws are correctly located on the case before installing the mother.

I want larger cables included with the mother. Frequently I had cable length issues like too short SATA cables, trying to reach the drives…

Can the dual and triple SLI connectors being made flexible?

Frequently, a motherboard breaks and the RAID should migrate to another RAID controller in the new motherboard. (i.e. nvidia to Intel RAID). There are lots of programs able to read Nvidia, Via, Intel and AMD RAIDS by software, without the original chip. The driver disk should include one of those utilities.
Also, including bootable Puppy Linux would be very useful, and only would take 100 Mb of the drivers disk.

The BIOS of my P6T does lots of checkings before booting. It takes too much time (secondary SATA controller, RAID controller, etc). I want to boot fast, I don't want to set up a RAID of SSD only to loose time in booting. Include BIOS options to save previous state, so at each boot, the BIOS assume the old configuration, and run faster. I would cause problem sometimes, so it should be off by default.

Include in the manual (and better in the motherboard) color cues about how to connect front panel USB cables. Crappy cases include USB connectors able to be connected the wrong way, leading to burnt cables, and avoidable RMA.

Each motherboard with integrated sound I tested, had noise problems. Fix it.
Also, I like to plug earphones right into the speaker plug. Frequently they don’t have enough volume. It’s necessary to have a software driver able to reach more than Windows allows, and also simple normalization.


Manuals should include the BIOS beep error codes, or at least an URL for the specific BIOS utilised.

 

[tychoblu]

Fan connectors: more of them, in strategic locations and labeled. Software to run them properly with some tweaking capability.

8 pin power connector: can you change the location? With bottom mounted psu's, running a thick cable all the way up near the cpu is terrible.

Bios reset button: Something easy to get to and use, maybe a button to use last known good settings. Overclocking nightmare, my reset is under my video card!!!

Ethernet driver: The hardest part of getting a new rig up and running is connecting to the internet so you can download up-to-date drivers. With the innovations in non-volatile memory, are we ever going to see a cmos chip that can pass an Ethernet driver (onboard wireless would be even better) to the operating system? Better yet, auto installs all the main boards’ drivers and checks for new ones.

I have a dream: a flash based, onboard, bootable chip that can rid a system of viruses that is automatically updated with new virus definitions.

 

[rohitbaran]

I would like an ITX motherboard with the LGA 1366 socket with 2 PCLe slots so that I can have a SFF PC with a powerful CPU and a chipset that is capable of handling 2 graphics cards. I need it because I want to take my CPU whenever I tour.

 

[zodiacfml]

Just a micro-atx or smaller board with all the usual stuff such as 16x PCI-e and good on-board video but with a theme of the Terran in Starcraft preferably using colors black and gray.

 

[theubersmurf]

I'd like to see something useful for basic htpc use. An integrated ClearQAM, ATSC and NTSC tuner on a pci-e bus. A dual tuner would obviously be nice, but a combo tuner would probably be sufficient. In order to create the real estate on the mobo you could ditch some legacy hardware buses, which will go unused by large majority of buyers anyway. Also do away with any pci, pci-e x1 or x8 form factor slots. The Pcie x1 slot is a poor physical design, with a delicate interface. Make the Physical bus x4, even if it only supports x1 bandwidth. I can use it for any x4 or x1 device (though with limited bandwidth obviously) Same holds true for the x8 slot in relation to the x16 size slots. A useless in-between size that if it were x16 size physically would make possible the installation of any of the two larger bandwidth buses. Just make sure they're reasonably clearly marked on the mobo.

Make available a remote for the tuner that you can buy separately, or one that can use some fairly common or conventional ones.

 

[marraco]

Crazy idea:

I want little motherboards to be used like PCI/PCI-E cards. They should only have memory slots and processor sockets, so I can plug my old processor and memory after an upgrade, and use them as extra CPU on my new rig.

 

[damric]

Heatsinks on any chip that gets warm, and active cooling on hottest areas to help with overclocking. I do not like when I feel naked components on my motherboard are extremely hot to touch such as voltage regulation circuitry. Temperature sensors that display on a Windows Sidebar Gadget would be nice. Customizeable boot-up screens would be cool. The two ASRock mobo's I own are excellent, but always room for improvement.

 

[seiichi]

Imagine a fully customizable, modulated motherboard where you can make your own personal board by choosing the CPU slot/socket, type/number of RAM slots, chipset, etc. Also you can upgrade parts instead of replacing the motherboard and having find a board to match your processor, ram, etc. All you'd have to do is flash a new bios and buy the chipset software. I'm having this exact issue, I want to upgrade my board however I would have to replace my CPU(Core 2 Quad) and RAM(DDR2) as well but I can't afford to buy them all at once or find the perfect board for what I want/need. Not sure if someone already had this idea.

 

[HelloWorld0_0]

I would really like to see a motherboard printed toward gamers. This would entail a built in high quality sound, a more highly capable network card. Also more user friendly overclocking options, I also think some sort of lighting system would be greatly appreciated by many. I think built in wifi would also be a compelling addition for those of us want to cut down or wires, or don't have a covinent place to do a wired connection. A display on the motherboard that showed temperatures and such coupled with accurate temperature reading device would be nifty as well. It could even have some buttons on the display that could easily overclock the CPU and GPU, now that would be pretty awesomet. Lastly, just make it look plain awesome with a more cohesive color palet, I've always been a fan of the shiny metallic look.

 

[zenpuck42]

Externalise the clock battery so that case makers can add a slot so that user's can easily change when it has expired.

 

[Guest]

i would like a motherboard that has both normal cpu and a low powered cpu ( intel atom)/AMD zacate on the same board, dynamically switching between the main cpu and the low power core for maximum efficiency..

 

[elcentral]

1. ceep it to e-sata ports for the hard drives gets so much better room on the Mobo

2. 2 sli/cross fire ports the performens drops to the floor when higer any ways.

3. id love it to run a AMD sens they are so cost/performens efficient.

4. make sure the sli/cross fire ports got plenty of rom often you gotta cramp 2 cards together or ewen worse lose a slot from ewer being used.

5. a easy self clock in the mobo it self, i hate the softwares you get whit some mobo they promise so hig clock but they fail half way and end up being in the way.

6. no fanns for the north or south bridge, but its lovely to get one whit if you wather cool your system realy make it simpler.

well asrock you do good mobos ceep up the good work and cya in future builds ;b

inspired pc builder
Tobias Bergstrand.

 

[The_Prophecy]

I say get Intel to jump onboard with this (no pun intended) and have a motherboard that rids the user of those damn PCI slots. Once Intel starts putting out chipsets (and CPU's) that support enough PCI-E lanes, we can finally get rid of this horribly outdated slot.