[SOLVED] Opinions on mobo visual design

[bumblebee953]

Typically the most eye-catching visual design areas of a motherboard are either the chunk of I/O armor near the VRM heatsink and the RGB on/around it, or the design of the chipset plate towards the bottom right of the board and the RGB on/around it .
I wonder what the point of all this is, if their positioning limits their visibility to some very specific builds. You can't really have a large tower cooler because most desk mounted computers will be placed in such a way where your eye looks towards the rear exhaust fan at an angle, with the tower cooler blocking most, if not all, of the visual interest of the I/O armor design and RGBs. Pretty much the only way to solve this is to go with more slender tower cooler designs or go with AIOs or full water cool solutions entirely.
Similar issues with the chipset part. GPUs are continuing to grow larger in design. Most of that bling from the chipset is visually blocked by the GPU anyway. If you have enough PCIe x 16 slots you might be able to mount the GPU in a lower slot to make the chipset more visible but again that is limiting on the type of build.
The ASRock z490 Taichi is sexy as hell with the "gear design" chipset and the RGB on the I/O armor. But most builds I've seen with the mentioned components render all of those blocked from view...

 

[CountMike]

Typically the most eye-catching visual design areas of a motherboard are either the chunk of I/O armor near the VRM heatsink and the RGB on/around it, or the design of the chipset plate towards the bottom right of the board and the RGB on/around it .
I wonder what the point of all this is, if their positioning limits their visibility to some very specific builds. You can't really have a large tower cooler because most desk mounted computers will be placed in such a way where your eye looks towards the rear exhaust fan at an angle, with the tower cooler blocking most, if not all, of the visual interest of the I/O armor design and RGBs. Pretty much the only way to solve this is to go with more slender tower cooler designs or go with AIOs or full water cool solutions entirely.
Similar issues with the chipset part. GPUs are continuing to grow larger in design. Most of that bling from the chipset is visually blocked by the GPU anyway. If you have enough PCIe x 16 slots you might be able to mount the GPU in a lower slot to make the chipset more visible but again that is limiting on the type of build.
The ASRock z490 Taichi is sexy as hell with the "gear design" chipset and the RGB on the I/O armor. But most builds I've seen with the mentioned components render all of those blocked from view...

MB design is mostly influenced by it's traces and need to be as short as possible, there are miles of traces in several layers which have to be separated by certain amount so they don't induct each other., so called topology. Then there are coolers and heat transfer. The rest is cosmetic but lately it may interfere with heat elimination etc.