What are your ideal motherboard features?

1337Goat

Gawd
Joined
Apr 15, 2020
Messages
743
Selecting a motherboard isn't enough. Let's say you're *designing* one instead.

What features do you put in? Don't be worried about going over budget. Even chipsets and cooling solutions can be configured to your ideal.
 
Passive cooling
USB C
Higher end sound card
Diagnostic LED debug code screen
Quality VRMs
Thick PCB
Neutral color paint and decals (black)
Multiple fan headers (6 minimum)and at least one pump header
3 NVME/m.2slots
 
All of the above plus plenty of thermal sensors, plenty of USB, 10 gig ethernet x2, wifi
 
What they said, plus:

Lots of RAM.
Lots of On-Board data links. (NVMe/M.2 and Sata III ports for now.)
 
In addition to the above:

Did anyone mention Bluetooth?

Small speaker, since some don't come with one, for diagnostic purposes or for people that don't want to carry speakers when they carry their case.

One oldschool pci slot (not PCIe) for those of us who have an old, work required card that isn't available in PCIe format

One PS2 kybd/mouse input for those of us that are holding onto our IBM model M keyboards with a death grip. Also, there are situations where USB keybords don't work but PS2 do when troubleshooting.

back plate for cooling and cpu cooler support

Rear ins/outs that are spaced far enough apart that you can fit slightly bloated plugs in side-by-side

Support for full advertised RAM speed on all 4 slots without having to go in and mess with settings

Setup menus and driver installatoin processes that more clearly separate bloatware attacks from necessary tasks

documentation that states specifically how and where to responsibly recycle the hardware when it becomes obsolete

RGB lighting ONLY if accompanied with a LARGE light up Little Tykes or Fisher Price logo
 
A speaker onboard and Hal 3000 voice but you can customize the name it speaks
 
An ATX board that actually has all seven expansion slots populated with PCIe x16 connectors and a BIOS that allows me to allocate the platform's available lanes to any of them as I see fit.
 
Bios that doesn't suck, timely updates that are thoroughly tested, non invasive vendor software, easy onboard fan management.

Vendor CS that will cross ship RMAs and isn't an Asus level of hassle.

Solid power delivery, debug indicators of some kind, cooler mounting options that fit whatever I have at the time so I'm not waiting for a next week delivery like I am right now, Intel lan, fan headers that don't require me to litter the build with splitters, USB/audio/etc case header locations that let me do very short runs to make some kid happy with cable management.
 
  • ITX
  • 3 or more fan headers
  • No chipset fan
  • 2 x front panel USB-C headers (possibly 1 40-pin header would work)
  • Dual NIC
  • No video out on rear panel - more room for stuff I'd use
  • Nice, thick PCB
  • Reinforced PCI-E slot
  • Good BIOS - don't put RAM timings in two different sections, for example. Keep it well organized.
  • USB Bios flash
  • 2 x m.2 slots with the option to turn one into a thunderbolt port
 
Similar to the spec above. ITX, 3+ fan headers, 2 x m.2 slots, and good quality 100% passive cooling. And no useless USB 1.0 / 2.0 ports, instead would like 4 or 5 current gen USB. 4 or 5 current gen SATA... Easily accessible BIOS reset, on/off buttons, and LED/debug on the board... And good power delivery
 
I'd go for most of the above features, but add an additional feature that if the motherboard detects any RGB in the system, it spontaneously sets itself on fire and burns the computer to the ground.
 
Passive cooling
USB C
Higher end sound card
Diagnostic LED debug code screen
Quality VRMs
Thick PCB
Neutral color paint and decals (black)
Multiple fan headers (6 minimum)and at least one pump header
3 NVME/m.2slots
The above, but I'll settle for functional audio. 'Higher end' makes it sound like trying too hard, and honestly, I just want sound out of them. If I'm plugging something nice in, it'll have a dedicated DAC and amp stage :).
All of the above plus plenty of thermal sensors, plenty of USB, 10 gig ethernet x2, wifi
Mostly, plenty of USB. I've found lately that boards are coming with one USB2 header, which sounds okay until you realize that there's a lot of stuff that just needs to be hooked up. I wound up using an internal powered hub.

But the 10Gbit is one thing that started to catch on, and then stopped. Companies are happy to put 2.5Gbit ports where 10Gbit would be. And maybe that's fine, I'll take it, but I'd prefer 10Gbit as the current top-end copper ethernet interface.

Did anyone mention Bluetooth?
Anyone who isn't trying hard to cut corners includes the Intel module with 2x2 WiFi 6 along with Bluetooth 5.0. That's really the easy part!
 
An ATX board that actually has all seven expansion slots populated with PCIe x16 connectors and a BIOS that allows me to allocate the platform's available lanes to any of them as I see fit.

The problem with that is that this would require a ton of PCIe switches to accomplish this. It would also require 16x physical lanes per slot and PCB design that's thick enough to handle that many traces. On something like X570, this would be incredibly expensive to achieve.

Honestly, I think people largely misunderstand what's going on here. Allot of what's being asked for is largely already available. The problem is that few of the people who frequent this forum want to pay for those motherboards. In my opinion, the issue with the motherboard market is that you often end up with features you don't want that you have to pay for in order to get the level of quality you really want. You can't get an MSI X570 motherboard under $250 with good VRM's as an example of this. Many of us don't want the onboard audio, the onboard LAN or WiFi as the motherboard makers tend to choose implementations we don't like or won't use in the first place. It would be nice if we could see a return to motherboards with fewer integrated features so that we could avoid having devices we didn't want onboard. Unfortunately, that's not realistic because those aren't necessarily the features that drive the prices up.

They do to a degree, but dropping these things wouldn't reduce prices as much as you'd think. Overall system cost would likely go way up if you had to buy a network adapter that was significantly better than an Intel i211-AT or i219v. Same on the audio front. Although, that one makes more sense given that many headphones have their own DAC or you can use your GPU's HDMI for audio.
 
Mini-ITX, bluetooth, an Intel NIC and adequate cooling. The rest is meh.
 
Bios that doesn't suck

Yeah I'd be happy just for that, they really lowered the bar since the last desktop system I put together.

...but add an additional feature that if the motherboard detects any RGB in the system, it spontaneously sets itself on fire and burns the computer to the ground.

Had to laugh, with you on that one. Seems you either love RGB or hate it.
 
I'd like inclusion of a slot and antenna for people using bt+wifi to upgrade if there's issues.

Intel lan is a must bc I don't always use Windows, but it doesn't have to be soldered to the board.

I want attention paid to fan options bc working at home means I can't rely on office AC to bandaid temp problems.
 
I'd like inclusion of a slot and antenna for people using bt+wifi to upgrade if there's issues.
They all pretty much do this, though it's usually hidden underneath the rear port cluster shroud.

Intel lan is a must bc I don't always use Windows, but it doesn't have to be soldered to the board.
That and for the price, Intel produces the best NICs. Same for ten and probably one hundred times the price too; if it's not a server pull off Ebay, Intel usually has the best NIC available for desktop or homelab use.

I want attention paid to fan options bc working at home means I can't rely on office AC to bandaid temp problems.
This seems to be done pretty well across the board, so long as the board in question ships with the vendor's best efforts.
 
Does it have to be even remotely plausible? If not......

A PS2 port so I can pretend I need that dedicated interupt to fr@g n00bz in CS:GO
An IDE port so I dont need to constantly worry that my older boards are going to die and I wont be able to interface with old xbox HDDs anymore (Yes I could probobly use an adapter, no I have never tried)
Im going to say Dual 10gbe, with no wifi/bluetooth
I want a minimum of 10 SATA ports with an actual hardware RAID controller that supports 0,1,5,6 and JBOD, as well as all the variants of those (0+1, 10, 50, 60 etc..)
I want 4X PCIe X16 (Physically), electrically I wouldnt be too upset if they put a couple PLX chips in and limited the bandwith to a slot or two to X4 PCIe 3.0+
I.WANT.SIDEWAYS.USB.3.HEADERS!!! Somthing like this shouldnt be anything other than standard features by now, the pins in the USB3 header are probobly more fragile than pins in an LGA socket.
On the above note, I want right angled 24 pin power connectors too, basically any connector on the front edge (near the memory) needs to be right angled
Dont get me wrong I love a good ol motherboard speaker, but those 2 digit LED post code displays blew me away when I first saw them, I need one of those
I want to be able to electronically disable any singular PCI-e connection (Shut down the M.2 slot, shut down PCIe 1 and 3 but not 0 and 2, shut down the SATA ports etc..)
Absolutely no RGB or gaudy LED's, NONE
I want a built in power/reset button, as well as a clear CMOS on the back. Maybe an actual USB port on the inside, thought I dont exactly know why......(run a hypervisor on a flash drive I guess)
Noise doesnt bother me, so i want active cooling on the chipset and voltage regulation, plus a decent VRM (I dont OC as much as I used to, but I like stability)
I want the board to at least look like it has a traditional BIOS (Youve got your grays, and a blue bar on the top, welcome to a BIOS) no fancy background, no sound effects, no graphics, no mouse support. Oldschool AMI bios.
A lifetime warranty on all of the above :D

I think thats it?
 
1) Better onboard networking.
- sfp+ port should be standard in this day & age.
- m-gig is DOA, expensive & power hungry.
- 1Gbit/s is like what, 20 years old now?
- Onboard SFP+ should at a minimum support VF functionality.for passthrough to vm guests.
2) Good build quality/vrms.
3) More pci-e lanes overall.
4) 3 x16 physical slots. I want to be able to choose & divide the lanes as:
- x16 x4 x0
- x8 x8 x4
- x8 x4 x4 + m.2 slot
5) At least 3 m.2 slots. They don't all have to be active, but at least give me the option
- Allow me to divide chipset lanes among these.
- Can share with sata headers (I use very few sata drive these days..maybe 2 max?)
- Replace sata ports with x1 m.2 slots. Maybe in e-atx board option?
6) Linux support out of the box. Most boards are pretty good about this these days but not all are.
7) Bios updates for 5 years, or for as long as Intel/AMD put out microcode updates.
- Published bios & firmware updates to fwupd.org so I can update natively in linux.
8) Motherboard companies taking bugs regarding bios/power/sleep/iommu grouping issues seriously & being responsive
9) Out of band serial/management/kvm/remote power on/off support.
10) Official ECC support for ecc/unbuffered on cpus that have that support.
11) Availability @ Retail!

I typically go for the $150 boards. If all of the above were impelemented/true I think I'd pay up to the $400-$500 range.
 
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1) Better onboard networking.
- sfp+ port should be standard in this day & age.
- m-gig is DOA, expensive & power hungry.
- 1Gbit/s is like what, 20 years old now?
- Onboard SFP+ should at a minimum support VF functionality.for passthrough to vm guests.
At this point, I agree, for anything that says 'workstation' on it. Dual SFP+, at least one GigE for utility usage if ever needed (i.e., out-of-band), and one dedicated for IPMI.

Main mitigation point for m-gig is that future controllers fabbed at smaller nodes -- the Aquantia chipset is 28nm -- might alleviate some of that pain in terms of power usage and ASIC cost. And running custom fiber about still isn't something common to residential installations, while DACs have limits that CAT6A doesn't -- and a builder shouldn't be in business if they can't run CAT6A.

5) At least 3 m.2 slots. They don't all have to be active, but at least give me the option
- Allow me to divide chipset lanes among these.
- Can share with sata headers (I use very few sata drive these days..maybe 2 max?)
My Z390 Taichi Ultimate has this, and they're already all filled. Bigger issue is the availability of cost-effective solutions. QLC works for storage-class drives, quite well in fact, but I'd like to see a 'hybrid' design that pairs some real low-latency, high-endurance flash like Optane with it for boot drives.
6) Linux support out of the box. Most boards are pretty good about this these days but not all are.
Actually haven't run into this; at least, having a board that won't work with 'Linux'. Plenty of distributions pulling all kinds of stupidity of course, including the bigger ones, but less so these days.
10) Official ECC support for ecc/unbuffered on cpus that have that support.
Definitely like to see more of this. It's actually not that necessary, but it's also not hard either.
I typically go for the $150 boards. If all of the above were impelemented/true I think I'd pay up to the $400-$500 range.
I used to... until I started trying to do 10Gbit. I settled on boards that had the Aquantia controller built in where I could, but apparently that's now a US$500 ask minimum with 2.5Gbit controllers filling that spot on lower tiers.

So now I need a spare PCIe 3.0+ x4 slot...
 
Sounds like everyone wants more of what we already have, or to bring back PS/2... My god...

How about a nice dual socket board like EVGA had with the SR2. That's what I want in a board but sadly none of these manufacturers have the balls to put something like that out
 
Sounds like everyone wants more of what we already have, or to bring back PS/2... My god...

How about a nice dual socket board like EVGA had with the SR2. That's what I want in a board but sadly none of these manufacturers have the balls to put something like that out
What would be the point? We already have up to 64 cores in one socket.
 
Does it have to be even remotely plausible? If not......

A PS2 port so I can pretend I need that dedicated interupt to fr@g n00bz in CS:GO
An IDE port so I dont need to constantly worry that my older boards are going to die and I wont be able to interface with old xbox HDDs anymore (Yes I could probobly use an adapter, no I have never tried)
Im going to say Dual 10gbe, with no wifi/bluetooth
I want a minimum of 10 SATA ports with an actual hardware RAID controller that supports 0,1,5,6 and JBOD, as well as all the variants of those (0+1, 10, 50, 60 etc..)
I want 4X PCIe X16 (Physically), electrically I wouldnt be too upset if they put a couple PLX chips in and limited the bandwith to a slot or two to X4 PCIe 3.0+
I.WANT.SIDEWAYS.USB.3.HEADERS!!! Somthing like this shouldnt be anything other than standard features by now, the pins in the USB3 header are probobly more fragile than pins in an LGA socket.
On the above note, I want right angled 24 pin power connectors too, basically any connector on the front edge (near the memory) needs to be right angled
Dont get me wrong I love a good ol motherboard speaker, but those 2 digit LED post code displays blew me away when I first saw them, I need one of those
I want to be able to electronically disable any singular PCI-e connection (Shut down the M.2 slot, shut down PCIe 1 and 3 but not 0 and 2, shut down the SATA ports etc..)
Absolutely no RGB or gaudy LED's, NONE
I want a built in power/reset button, as well as a clear CMOS on the back. Maybe an actual USB port on the inside, thought I dont exactly know why......(run a hypervisor on a flash drive I guess)
Noise doesnt bother me, so i want active cooling on the chipset and voltage regulation, plus a decent VRM (I dont OC as much as I used to, but I like stability)
I want the board to at least look like it has a traditional BIOS (Youve got your grays, and a blue bar on the top, welcome to a BIOS) no fancy background, no sound effects, no graphics, no mouse support. Oldschool AMI bios.
A lifetime warranty on all of the above :D

I think thats it?

This is why many of you aren't allowed to design motherboards. Once again, I see people asking for several features that are already available today and have been for several years. Other "wants" here either make no sense or wouldn't have enough appeal for any motherboard manufacturer to offer those features or designs because they don't see any mass market appeal to them. So, here we go again. :)

A PS2 port so I can pretend I need that dedicated interupt to fr@g n00bz in CS:GO

This is fine. Plenty of gaming oriented motherboards still use PS/2 ports to this day. This is an example of a feature that never went away and is still present on many motherboard options.

An IDE port so I dont need to constantly worry that my older boards are going to die and I wont be able to interface with old xbox HDDs anymore (Yes I could probobly use an adapter, no I have never tried)

The USB adapters work fine. There is no need to waste PCIe lanes and PCB real estate on this for a niche use case.

Im going to say Dual 10gbe, with no wifi/bluetooth

This would be very expensive. This is typically something you only see on motherboards designed for the workstation and server markets. Again, this already exists. I don't disagree with the desire for this either. I'm simply pointing out why you don't see it being done on gaming / consumer motherboards.

I want a minimum of 10 SATA ports with an actual hardware RAID controller that supports 0,1,5,6 and JBOD, as well as all the variants of those (0+1, 10, 50, 60 etc..)

10 SATA ports are only done on the HEDT space now and even then, it's usually 8x. M.2/NVMe has really taken the market by storm and fewer and fewer of these ports are available all the time. I don't know that anyone produces a SATA controller that does what you want precisely as I've never looked for one. I've certainly never seen one that's integrated into the motherboard. These are never true hardware RAID controllers. They simply use an option ROM to manage the configuration. However, SAS controllers accept SATA devices, so you can get what you want a sense. Occasionally, SAS controllers are built into motherboards. The reason you won't typically see integration of those controllers is because of the market space we are typically talking about. The costs are high and the benefit / use cases don't justify it.

I want 4X PCIe X16 (Physically), electrically I wouldnt be too upset if they put a couple PLX chips in and limited the bandwith to a slot or two to X4 PCIe 3.0+

You get this in the HEDT space. As for PLX chips, they cost a small fortune and introduce latency. It's been proven time and time again that these aren't terribly useful. There are several reasons why the mainstream and gaming segments abandoned their use long ago. With the amount of lanes we have in the mainstream segment and with the increased amounts of PCIe switching, it just doesn't make any sort of sense to use PLX chips in this application.

I.WANT.SIDEWAYS.USB.3.HEADERS!!! Somthing like this shouldnt be anything other than standard features by now, the pins in the USB3 header are probobly more fragile than pins in an LGA socket.

Agreed, but the reason for this comes down to the limitations it imposes on PCB design and potentially costs. Right angled ports probably cost slightly more than straight ones and the motherboard makers probably have nearly an endless supply of the existing ports on hand.

On the above note, I want right angled 24 pin power connectors too, basically any connector on the front edge (near the memory) needs to be right angled

Not everyone desires this, but it's less of a limitation of PCB real esate here.

Dont get me wrong I love a good ol motherboard speaker, but those 2 digit LED post code displays blew me away when I first saw them, I need one of those

Umm.. these are quite common. Also, you can hook up a speaker if you want one. I've occasionally seen both speakers and POST code LED displays on boards. Many motherboards also have tiny LCD displays on them which can display far more information and can even do so in plain english.

I want to be able to electronically disable any singular PCI-e connection (Shut down the M.2 slot, shut down PCIe 1 and 3 but not 0 and 2, shut down the SATA ports etc..)

ASUS offers this on several models. Or at least did, regarding PCIe slots. Many ROG had this feature over the years. There is no need to shut down SATA ports as they support hot plugging.

Absolutely no RGB or gaudy LED's, NONE

Turn it off if it bothers you. Aside from that, MSI's X570 Unify lacks RGB LED's of any kind onboard. It can still control them via headers, but has none of its own.

I want a built in power/reset button, as well as a clear CMOS on the back. Maybe an actual USB port on the inside, thought I dont exactly know why......(run a hypervisor on a flash drive I guess)

This is possible on more boards than I can count. Many have these features. Unfortunately, it raises the cost. As for the USB port, that's harder to do. I've never seen this on consumer boards but you can always do it via a header and careful wiring if you really want to.

Noise doesnt bother me, so i want active cooling on the chipset and voltage regulation, plus a decent VRM (I dont OC as much as I used to, but I like stability)

Active cooling isn't generally necessary on most chipsets or VRM's. They simply do not warrant it. It's also a shitty solution compared to liquid cooling which offers far superior results. If you care about thermals, that's what you should be doing.

I want the board to at least look like it has a traditional BIOS (Youve got your grays, and a blue bar on the top, welcome to a BIOS) no fancy background, no sound effects, no graphics, no mouse support. Oldschool AMI bios.
A lifetime warranty on all of the above :D

Have you not looked at some UEFI implementations? Some, like GIGABYTE's aren't too far off aside from the colors. I've never heard a UEFI implementation's sound effects because they don't have them. You can also turn off the fancy animations if you want to. No mouse support? Why? Nothing stops you from avoiding the use of the mouse. It isn't remotely required. Basically, this is a ridiculous list of wants here and makes no sense. While I'm sure you aren't alone, there is no performance benefit to what you want and in fact, you might lose features going that route. The newer UEFI implementations work just fine by keyboard and behave enough like an old school BIOS, that I can't understand this.
 
Why would dual 10Gb be very expensive? I can go buy used dual port 10Gb PCIe cards for about $35. They are older models and fiber of course but it's not like the newer cards really do anything better except maybe lower power consumption.

For that price they come with the tranceivers.

Looking around, I see other dual port 10Gb nics for $18 but they don't include the transceivers.

There really is not reason for 10Gb to be much more expensive than 1Gb except for the fact that the mfgs want to charge way, way, way more.
 
Just give me a good layout where everything can be reached without having to remove expansion cards, heatsinks, whatever.

And plenty of space between slots. None of this, you use this slot and you lose another slot type idiocy.

Been wanting something like this for decades.
 
Why would dual 10Gb be very expensive? I can go buy used dual port 10Gb PCIe cards for about $35.
They weren't US$35 when produced, and they aren't that cheap new today. Further, that's SFP+ which does require the right transceivers for whatever you're using.

When talking about 10Gbase-T... yeah. That's expensive no matter what you do, largely because the enterprise market moved on and the consumer market really just does not need it.
 
...the consumer market really just does not need it.

Yeah it would be nice to have a 10Gb LAN, but is it something I need, not really. I do large LAN transfers once in a while and it would be nice if it was faster, but I can get by on 1Gb. I suppose if 10Gb over copper gets cheap enough I'd upgrade, but there's other stuff I'd spend money on before that. The main thing for me is 10Gb USB since that's how I do all my backups and mostly how I do file transfers.
 
Yeah it would be nice to have a 10Gb LAN, but is it something I need, not really. I do large LAN transfers once in a while and it would be nice if it was faster, but I can get by on 1Gb. I suppose if 10Gb over copper gets cheap enough I'd upgrade, but there's other stuff I'd spend money on before that. The main thing for me is 10Gb USB since that's how I do all my backups and mostly how I do file transfers.
What we're seeing instead is 2.5Gbit mostly; and while that's not 10Gbit, it is still 2.5x faster and it's also cheaper and runs across Cat5e and so on. Mostly only annoys me because I already have the 10Gbit copper switch that's also trucked to a 1Gbit switch :)

[as an aside, we're seeing access points and NAS' and so on coming with 2.5Gbit in addition to consumer routers, so that's actually moving up and down the chain vs. 10Gbit that kind of came and went]
 
For content creators who are using AMD, I would love a Thunderbolt 3 connection that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Guess I'm looking forward to USB4 or the x670 platform.
 
Dan, this is a pie in the sky "what would you put on it if you built it" thread, not a "what do you not like about what's out there" thread.

I had other words for it but yours is clean so I'm going with it this time 'round :barefoot:
 
8 Sata ports

Right now Real Tek isn't working on my Asrock so maybe some other onboard that isn't Real Tek.
 
I think you either misread or missed completely what the OP said, I quoted it below for your convenience.

I was asked to list my ideal fantasy features, with no regards to practicality or cost, so thats what I did. Also, you dont need HEDT to get most of the features I want, I have this board now and it ticks most of the boxes, just not all of them in one place.


This is why many of you aren't allowed to design motherboards. Once again, I see people asking for several features that are already available today and have been for several years. Other "wants" here either make no sense or wouldn't have enough appeal for any motherboard manufacturer to offer those features or designs because they don't see any mass market appeal to them. So, here we go again. :)

A PS2 port so I can pretend I need that dedicated interupt to fr@g n00bz in CS:GO

This is fine. Plenty of gaming oriented motherboards still use PS/2 ports to this day. This is an example of a feature that never went away and is still present on many motherboard options.

An IDE port so I dont need to constantly worry that my older boards are going to die and I wont be able to interface with old xbox HDDs anymore (Yes I could probobly use an adapter, no I have never tried)

The USB adapters work fine. There is no need to waste PCIe lanes and PCB real estate on this for a niche use case.

Im going to say Dual 10gbe, with no wifi/bluetooth

This would be very expensive. This is typically something you only see on motherboards designed for the workstation and server markets. Again, this already exists. I don't disagree with the desire for this either. I'm simply pointing out why you don't see it being done on gaming / consumer motherboards.

I want a minimum of 10 SATA ports with an actual hardware RAID controller that supports 0,1,5,6 and JBOD, as well as all the variants of those (0+1, 10, 50, 60 etc..)

10 SATA ports are only done on the HEDT space now and even then, it's usually 8x. M.2/NVMe has really taken the market by storm and fewer and fewer of these ports are available all the time. I don't know that anyone produces a SATA controller that does what you want precisely as I've never looked for one. I've certainly never seen one that's integrated into the motherboard. These are never true hardware RAID controllers. They simply use an option ROM to manage the configuration. However, SAS controllers accept SATA devices, so you can get what you want a sense. Occasionally, SAS controllers are built into motherboards. The reason you won't typically see integration of those controllers is because of the market space we are typically talking about. The costs are high and the benefit / use cases don't justify it.

I want 4X PCIe X16 (Physically), electrically I wouldnt be too upset if they put a couple PLX chips in and limited the bandwith to a slot or two to X4 PCIe 3.0+

You get this in the HEDT space. As for PLX chips, they cost a small fortune and introduce latency. It's been proven time and time again that these aren't terribly useful. There are several reasons why the mainstream and gaming segments abandoned their use long ago. With the amount of lanes we have in the mainstream segment and with the increased amounts of PCIe switching, it just doesn't make any sort of sense to use PLX chips in this application.

I.WANT.SIDEWAYS.USB.3.HEADERS!!! Somthing like this shouldnt be anything other than standard features by now, the pins in the USB3 header are probobly more fragile than pins in an LGA socket.

Agreed, but the reason for this comes down to the limitations it imposes on PCB design and potentially costs. Right angled ports probably cost slightly more than straight ones and the motherboard makers probably have nearly an endless supply of the existing ports on hand.

On the above note, I want right angled 24 pin power connectors too, basically any connector on the front edge (near the memory) needs to be right angled

Not everyone desires this, but it's less of a limitation of PCB real esate here.

Dont get me wrong I love a good ol motherboard speaker, but those 2 digit LED post code displays blew me away when I first saw them, I need one of those

Umm.. these are quite common. Also, you can hook up a speaker if you want one. I've occasionally seen both speakers and POST code LED displays on boards. Many motherboards also have tiny LCD displays on them which can display far more information and can even do so in plain english.

I want to be able to electronically disable any singular PCI-e connection (Shut down the M.2 slot, shut down PCIe 1 and 3 but not 0 and 2, shut down the SATA ports etc..)

ASUS offers this on several models. Or at least did, regarding PCIe slots. Many ROG had this feature over the years. There is no need to shut down SATA ports as they support hot plugging.

Absolutely no RGB or gaudy LED's, NONE

Turn it off if it bothers you. Aside from that, MSI's X570 Unify lacks RGB LED's of any kind onboard. It can still control them via headers, but has none of its own.

I want a built in power/reset button, as well as a clear CMOS on the back. Maybe an actual USB port on the inside, thought I dont exactly know why......(run a hypervisor on a flash drive I guess)

This is possible on more boards than I can count. Many have these features. Unfortunately, it raises the cost. As for the USB port, that's harder to do. I've never seen this on consumer boards but you can always do it via a header and careful wiring if you really want to.

Noise doesnt bother me, so i want active cooling on the chipset and voltage regulation, plus a decent VRM (I dont OC as much as I used to, but I like stability)

Active cooling isn't generally necessary on most chipsets or VRM's. They simply do not warrant it. It's also a shitty solution compared to liquid cooling which offers far superior results. If you care about thermals, that's what you should be doing.

I want the board to at least look like it has a traditional BIOS (Youve got your grays, and a blue bar on the top, welcome to a BIOS) no fancy background, no sound effects, no graphics, no mouse support. Oldschool AMI bios.
A lifetime warranty on all of the above :D

Have you not looked at some UEFI implementations? Some, like GIGABYTE's aren't too far off aside from the colors. I've never heard a UEFI implementation's sound effects because they don't have them. You can also turn off the fancy animations if you want to. No mouse support? Why? Nothing stops you from avoiding the use of the mouse. It isn't remotely required. Basically, this is a ridiculous list of wants here and makes no sense. While I'm sure you aren't alone, there is no performance benefit to what you want and in fact, you might lose features going that route. The newer UEFI implementations work just fine by keyboard and behave enough like an old school BIOS, that I can't understand this.


Selecting a motherboard isn't enough. Let's say you're *designing* one instead.

What features do you put in? Don't be worried about going over budget. Even chipsets and cooling solutions can be configured to your ideal.
 
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Yeah, some of these wanted features are absurd, but it's what I wanted to see. Over the top fantasy features and ideas are the key to innovation.
Once an engineer sits down and looks at this thread, they'll know which items to cross off and which to pursue based on practical and intelligent criteria.
 
We need a four-slice toast bay between the CPU and the CPU cooler, with a bagel setting on the more expensive upgraded model.
 
Can't release that until the market is done buying out the original model without it. Then release a new model so that they throw out the old and buy the new. Apple/Mac business strategy.
 
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