Well, yeah, I'd agree with you from a "cost plus" perspective. The LED's aren't costing the manufacturer very much, but in consumer products the trick is to find things that don't cost very much to you, but in the eyes of the typical consumer add value, and make them willing to pay more, and charge for it anyway. Thats how they drive larger profit margins. Pay a tiny bit more for a for a feature, charge a lot more for it.
In the gaming space, fancy looking heatsinks and RGB LED's fill that space.
I understand that my Zenith II Extreme alpha has a lot of stuff that drives up the cost, but quite frankly, most of it I could do without. The only thing I like that is on my Zenith II that wasn't on my old p9x79 WS are the sturdier PCIe slots. Over time, the plastic on the P9X79 got brittle, with the tabs on the back of the PCIe slots and on the memory sockets breaking. I don't see that happening with this board.
The functional stuff (beefier VRM's & MOSFET's, ) are good, maybe even necessary on a Threadripper, but honestly, I've never even tried overclocking this CPU, and I don't think I will. Unlike in the old days, the gains to effort ratio just don't make it worth it.
Ability to flash the BIOS without a CPU/RAM, and bios flashback are nice to have in a pinch I guess. I've never had a need for features like this in my 30+ years of doing this, but still nice to have I guess for that once in a lifetime moment when they suddenly become really important.
Everything else is a dumb waste for me:
1.) I don't use thunderbolt. (I don't even remember seeing it on the specs of my board, but I'll take your word for it being there) But if I wanted it and didn't have it, on a Threadripper I could easily just install a PCIe card as I have all these lanes and slots. No need to drive up the cost of the board for this.
2.) Aesthetic stuff (integrated IO Shield cover, fancy looking heatsinks, LED's) We've already covered this. I don't give a rats *** about motherboard aesthetics.
3.) Sound chips: I don't remember what was on my old p9x79 WS. I never used it. In the beginning I continued to use my X-Fi Titanium HD, but over time I migrated to various USB based external DAC solutions, and those just carried over to my new board.
4.) On board OLED Screen: This thing is moronic. I don't know why they even bothered putting it on the board. I guess someone out there likes it because they think it looks cool. (That someone isn't me)
5.) All the crazy M.2 slots and the proprietary RAM-looking slot (DIMM.2?) that serves as an M.2 expansion board. Don't know why I'd need 5x m.2 slots in total. (I'm using 2 right now, and that's sufficient) I'd rather just have more PCIe slots. That way, if I really wanted to, I could install one of those 16x PCIe to 4x m.2 boards I have three of in my server. PCIe is simply so much more useful because I can pop in anything I want in there and not be tied to the decisions ASUS made for me.
A board this size has room for 8 PCIe slots. One almost inevitably gets covered by the two slot GPU. So, I'd wan't 7 16x (physical) slots on the board, electrically populating them as best possible. I'm thinking like two of them 16x, three of them 8x, and two more 4x. That totals 64. Then maybe add two m.2 slots on board that share lanes with PCIe slots. You know, one of the 4x slots gets disabled if an m.2 drive is in one of the slots, and one of the 8x slots drops to 4x if the other m.2 slot is populated. That would give me the most flexibility. I just want them to not waste PCIe lanes on on board junk I'll never use.
One thing that is missing from this Zenith II that is baffling to me is PCIe bifurcation. No excuse for this feature to be missing at this price level.
I'd still prefer a barebones old school green board, with traditional basic looking heatsinks, even at the same price. Heck, I'd even pay more for it. Simplicity is always better. Less **** to break/go wrong.
I do want the functional stuff though. Beefy VRM's and MOSFET's, lots of sturdy PCIe slots, etc.
I can hear the next comment right away. If you didn't want this stuff, why did you buy this motherboard?
1.) Initially I didn't. I went with a Gigabyte Aorus Master.
a.) I didn't like this board either. It too had a lot of useless features I wasn't interested in (including dual on board sound chips for some stupid reason), and not enough PCIe slots.
b.) It failed on me and killed two threadrippers, forcing me to search locally for whatever TRX40 motherboard I could find in the middle of the pandemic supply woes. The only one I could find anywhere locally was an open box Zenith II at MicroCenter (and I didn't get much of an open box discount on it...)
2.) Even now, I can't find my ideal motherboard. All of the manufacturers have gone gamer crazy, and over-on board accessorized.
Give me a motherboard that is basic green or black, as many PCIe slots as possible, and nothing integrated on board, except what is included in the chipset (and thus unavoidable anyway) And give me back any spare chipset lanes as extra PCIe or m.2 slots. Give me PCIE bifurcation! Give me IOMMU/VT-D and ECC RAM Support. No RGB/LED/OLED Screens, no covered/integrated IO Shields and heatsinks are basic silver with visible heat pipes. Functional, not aesthetic. Also give me the beefiest VRM's and MOSFETS you can.
Essentially I want a Supermicro server board in a desktop form factor (EATX is fine), that can run desktop CPU's (server chips tend to have more cores than I need and and those cores are always clocked too low) but has typical enterprise features (ECC, PCIe Bifurcation, IOMMU/VT-D) and that has overclocking features enabled along with the VRM's and MOSFET's to best take advantage of them. That would be the PERFECT motherboard.
There's a motherboard I'd go stand in line and pay over MSRP for.
Something like this (but designed for TRX40 instead of the WX models would be
perfect:
View attachment 1436
