I'm with you. I hate paying for things I'll never use. Also, added features just ad added opportunities for failure, so I prefer streamlined things that have just what I want.
That said, Motherboards are the biggest offender here. Every goddamn motherboard on the market is full of on board features I'll never use. I would love a motherboard with
nothing outside of what is integrated into the chipset on board. heck, I don't even want most of what is on the chipset.
My perfect motherboard has no ethernet, no wifi, no sound, no SATA controller, only the USB ports that are built into the chipset. Instead the available PCIe lanes are used to maximize the numbers of PCIe and m.2 ports.
It's too bad PLX chips introduce latency. Otherwise I'd totally buy a board that pools the ~95GB/s bandwidth of Ryzen 7000's 24 Gen 5 lanes and provides eight 16x slots I can use as I see fit in a mix of newer and older generation slots.
All of that said, despite how much attention "gaming" gets these days, and for good reason as "gaming " parts have much higher margins than the few remaining non-"gaming" parts, the vast majority of CPU's and other parts sold are not going into gaming builds. Heck, they arent even going into custom builds at all. The king of volume is still highly integrated and custom OEM builds, and like 99% of these use on board graphics and integrated components.
None of my main builds in the modern era have had any integrated graphics, but that's just because of the models I've chosen:
- Intel Core i7-920
- Phenom X6 1090T
- Intel Core i7-3930k
- AMD Threadripper 3960x
Most of these have been so called "HEDT" models which generally don't have the integrated graphics.
HEDT seems to be a dying breed though