Larry Litmanen :
I am not saying Intel and motherboard manufacturers need to go to that extreme, but we have reached a point where removing some of these old ports will allow manufacturers to save money and pass them to the buyer.
DIY motherboards are a very different market segment than ultraportable laptops. In the latter you've got some people who are absolutely manic about having the absolute smallest, thinnest, lightest thing available, even if it removes commonly used features. Here we're still about products that are meant to be fairly robust and broad in what they cover. I do understand and agree a little in that some things can be trimmed off current boards.
Larry Litmanen :
Is there really a need for a PS/2 port on a performance motherboard?
Enough gamers still clamor and swear by PS/2 connectors over USB for keyboards, so this is mfrs still listening to their customers.
Larry Litmanen :
Why not remove all the USB 2.0 ports and maybe add 2 more USB 3.0 ports.
This is a limitation of the mboard chipset. Both Z97 and X99 only have six USB3 ports natively in the chipset To add more requires add-in controllers, which ups the price. Besides which, what would you use more than six USB3 ports for? The only things that take advantage of the extra bandwidth are large storage devices. Every other peripheral like mice, keyboards, scanners, and printers are perfectly happy at USB2 speeds. A USB network adapter might push USB2 to its limit, but considering the limitations of most ISPs and the fact you've got a gigabit Ethernet jack already, this is a non-issue.
Larry Litmanen :
I recently purchased a MSI motherboards called GAMING 5, it is a gaming motherboard (duhh), marketed towards people on the gaming/performance side. Obviously anyone buying this board in the retail store is buying it with an intent to play games, and almost no one who games in 2015 uses a VGA or DVI ports, it also has PS/2 port.
I agree that VGA ports should be removed from most boards now, certainly anything at the Z or X level. Those consumers buying motherboards that want to use integrated video on VGA only monitors are definitely not buying high performance parts. I think an integrated video port is still a helpful troubleshooting tool if you need to remove the DGPU. I think DVI is still more common than HDMI or DP, so I'm ok having that on a board. Also, you can get multi-display out across both integrated and discrete GPU, so having the video jack on an H97 board makes sense as the user might get a weaker dGPU without the right mix of video outs they want.
But no, I don't know why VGA ports are still taking up space on higher-level mboards ( unless they're being used exclusively for servers. )
Larry Litmanen :
I think they need to start removing some of the legacy ports and chips and make boards cleaner, cheaper and more affordable to manufacture and buy.
Again, I agree to a point, but remember X99 makes sense to the server and workstation crowd and not just extreme gaming. Plenty of those people still have parallel or serial port dongles for older legacy code and peripherals.
I wouldn't mind seeing a division in product lines, something where basic home and office products still had the legacy ports and others did away with them. I don't know what that would do to mfr costs to make more product lines, though.
firefoxx04 :
Sigh.. I know that in order to make things cheaper you need to compromise but only 4 ram slots for an X99 platform? To me, a big reason to go X99 is the idea that I can run LOTS of ram. What is the point of going X99 if you only want the lower end 6 core with less PCIe lanes and only 4 ram slots?
Call me crazy or missing the point but I would almost rather save even more and just stick with Z97.
Ok then, you're a little crazy.
28 PCIe lanes are more than 16 and 6 cores are more than 4. Someone that wants some low-level server use and can saturate every CPU thread will get better use out of the 5820K than they will out of the 4790K. A low-level 5820K build will run you about $750 for CPU, mboard, and 4-way 16GB RAM. The 5930K is already $180 more than that, and if you want to use all eight RAM slots, that's going to cost upwards of $700 or more for RAM alone.
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