Onus :
I'm going to disagree. I think you have it reversed. There's a HOWLING difference between H81 and H110; the former only provided PCIe 2.0 lanes to the x16 slot, and H110 gives you PCIe 3.0.
Nope,
Intel's own site says H110 is limited to PCIe 2.0. That's the chipset itself, of course. At least H110 let's the CPU operate at 3.0 ( H81 would cut all CPU-based PCIe down to 2.0, so that's at least one improvement ). But I'm not talking H81 vs H110. Every 1151 board will operate the CPU lanes at 3.0 speeds. I'm talking the value difference of H81 against B85/H97 vs the value difference of H110 against B150/H170. The performance jump from H81 to H110 is much smaller than B85 to B150 or H97 to H170, meaning the performance jump from H110 to B150 is much greater than from H81 to B150.
The $10 difference between an H81 and B85 board usually didn't get you anything extra you may have needed or wanted, so it was a toss up whether it was worth it. That same $10 now will get you much more, thus the H110 loses a lot of value to me. It still has a place for extremely tight budgets where every dollar counts. Perhaps the bottom-budget gamer won't care much because at least his GPU can run at 3.0 speeds ( not that he's using a strong enough GPU that cares about it anyway ) and he's not going to run any cards that care about 2.0 vs 3.0. But I don't think I'd recommend it to any custom builder right now except in the most specific corner cases. I think M.2 is going to become big in the next few years. If spending an extra $10 on your mboard now gets you a 32 Gbps M.2 slot, I think that's a no-brainer. And these aren't only on premium B150 boards. Gigabyte and MSI each have models at $65 for this.
Turkey, what you fail to recognize in number of USB ports is cost. The mfr has to pay extra for every additional USB controller chip they put on the board. Many boards from last gen that featured eight or more USB ports on the backplate ( plus a few internal headers ) required third party controllers. Expanding the chipset's USB capacity means they can put extra USB ports on the board for less cost than before. And I think cheaper mboards is something everyone can get behind.
As for how many USB ports you need, that of course is open to debate, and it's one I don't care to get into. Just keep in mind that we're going through a type-A to type-C port changeover, meaning you'll want both port types for now. A lot of people still have printers, scanners, and cameras that connect over USB. And we've also got cell phones, tablets, music players, and wearable tech that all charge over USB cables. I wouldn't be so quick to say most people don't use more than three USB ports.
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