A few snippets of what's coming up on our soon to be released next generation motherboards. RGB Audio Line Fully customizable RGB Audio Line that highlights the physical isolation from the rest of the PCB - Typically this has been one colour only (red or white). M.2 Shield Helps lower M.2 PCI-E Gen3 x4 SSD temperatures to maintain maximum speed and prevent throttling. Tom's Hardware example below, FYI; The editor tested 2 SSDs from Plextor, one with heatsinks (M8Pe(G)) and one without heatsink (MP8PeGN). The one with heatsink performed 40% better since the cooling will prevent throttling. Read more @ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/msi-200-series-m-2-heatsink,33106.html ...Not to mention it looks damn good and hides those nasty green PCBs found on most M.2 SSD's
I'm pretty sure your heat shield is actually a heat sink. But hey, it wouldn't be marketing without a large dose of bollocks.
Yeah, I get it. To me at least it just seems more reasonable to use a name that isn't already used to describe an existing functional piece of equipment, that does something different to a heat sink, which is what that thing actually is. Like the M.2 Thermal Annihilator or something like that. Anyway, it seems like a good idea and those chips can get hot so it is a nice feature for your boards.
from the placement with a high end GPU installed it may very well act as both a heat shield and sink, somehow, maybe?
It'd be awesome if you could use that RGB strip as a gain meter for the audio, so say you're recording something, you can tell the audio levels in application just by looking at the motherboard to see if clipping is occurring! And the m.2 sink/shield is another good feature, too. I'm guessing these will only be on the top-of-the-line boards though?