How about a feature that dynamically learns/stores settings of failed and successful overclocks - which it can then use to figure out way's of making the OC stable and give you recommendations on what setting to change and how to change it.
I'm not really interested in the prize but I'd like to make a couple suggestions anyway. What it boils down to is customisation. Say I had three PCs, all using the same motherboard from Asus, one set up as a basic file server with a slow cpu bit of ram and lots of SATA drives, another as a media centre with a VIVO gfx and a silent cooling setup, and another set up as a gaming PC. I'd want three pretty close but different BIOS set ups for this. For the file server with rapidly changing disk requirements, I would find it useful to have a boot device menu pop up. On the others, short boot time would be the priority. Instead of different manufacturers picking what they think is the best options to give people on the boot menu (eg press DEL to enter setup etc) have it totally customisable. Examples: - Have people choose if they want to run a memory test each boot. They might not and I doubt its REQUIRED each and every time, no matter how fast it goes. - Why redetect my SATA/PATA devices each time and give me a summary? - Allow people to show/hide shortcut keys for "EZ Flash", BIOS, bootable device summary - Allow people to select ALWAYS go to a bootable device summary with an optional countdown to the first device Having said that, if they do already offer any of these, just shoot me now. My P5KC doesn't so I thought it valid
How about integrating some flash memory on the motherboard and loading it with the motherboard drivers? (i do a similar thing with an old SD card kept in my card reader at all times and it's very handy) And if you were being really sneaky, you could add an option for it to emulate a sata driver floppy drive for older OS's If you did the above, (with a little portion of it set read-only maybe) you could also use it to store a backup bios file with keyboard shortcut to use that if the main bios fails as well as using it it to store bios overclocking profiles. My M2N32 SLI has most of those features there already, but putting the flash onboard would be more tidy Regarding layout, please bear in mind a lot of graphics cards are double slot cards when designing motherboards the layout on mine is: <pcie x16> - (graphics card) <pcie x4> (blocked by graphics card) <pci> (unused) <pcie x16> (pcie x4 raid card) <more pci slots> (unused) imho the pcie x4 slot was horribly placed I'd echo the request for more right-angled connectors that others mentioned too
An acrylic motherboard cover. (Would be hard to find a way to attach it to the motherboard and it'd be very hard to find a layout that more than 50-60% of people could use but I think it'd look fantastic.) Also having tried, in vain, to find a CPU-Z like tool for Ubuntu (I'm a linux noob), an in-bios stress program and benchmark might be quite usefull. EDIT: I'm not 18 so this isn't an entry really but I'd like to see these both implemented anyway
Damn most of the awesome ideas have been said, and then I stopped reading, so these might have been too. Swappable "covers" for slots, the slot remains much the same as a traditional slot but with some way of having sleek covers for colour coding your board to your mod. Instead of making all the connectors 90 degrees, include some 90 degree connectors. So you could plug in your sata/ide/atx connectors either the normal way, or use the 90 degree bend so they go off the side of the board. Some sort of quick boot linux based OS for media/internet/overclock test. Edit: Nearly forgot, a hybrid fan speed controller. The fans can be attached to the motherboard (hopefully in a discreet location), and a fan speed controller can be added to the front drive bays, which is connected to the motherboard. This could either be as simple as knobs to control the fans within parameters set in the bios for each fan/area, or just full controllable, the motherboard can kick in if the fans have been set too low. This could also go the extra step of outputting information such as fan speed or cpu speed and anything you like.
I haven't read all of the above comments, hope none of these have been mentioned: 1) Clearly state the number of setups that can be made with the 16x PCIe ports. I look for one quality in a motherboard and ONE ONLY, what is the lowest PCIe port that supports 16x . I look for motherboards that can run setups like (off-off-16x) or (off-16x-off) because it leads to 17*C lower temperatures on the GPU and significant noise reductions. Yes, I am not kidding. This has resulted in me once buying a 50$ motherboard and another time a 250$ one, simply because it is soo hard to find out what the motherboards can handle and when I find one, I buy it no amtter the cost. Please, I don't care if I win, just CLEARLY STATE on the box what PCIe 16x setups the motherboard supports, this doesn't even involve any hardware or software modifications, it is simply stating a fact that you hopefully already know. If you don't want to, please just answer my mail to your support: does ANY of your motherboards support running the PCIe port located the furthest down in 16x lanes. Try it out for yourselves, the advantages are HUGE! On most motherboards there is even some PCB below the lowest PCI slot which means that GPUs with dual slot coolers won't cover anything! 2) Make a sata powercable with several sata powerports located about 4cm apart 3) Remove the floppy port, it is obsolete. The PS2 port is however NOT OBSOLETE! Sometimes when the BIOS fails it cannot take any input from an USB keyboard and if you don't have a PS2 port and PS2 keyboard your motherboard is permanently broken. 4) Make some adjustable molexconnectors on the motherboard. It shouldn't be too hard to enable them to output 3.3V ; 5V ; 12V or any combination of these like 7V or 8.3V seen as they are all already supplied by the atx connector from the PSU... You could even make them adjustable so that they change depending on the CPU temperature or other factors or triggers. Advantages: < Adjustable cooling, not only for PWM fans as they sound more than their non-PWM counterparts but for other fans, peltiers and watercooling. < Modular feature, you may allow several different voltages, more options and more triggers on your high-end boards. < (Adjustable lights dependent on the CPU temperature, some people might enjoy this) 5) This is probably the hardest one to achieve but seen as you seem unable to move the ramslots as you haven't done it yet, could you perhaps tilt the ramslots a little? This would enable larger CPU coolers and a 10-20 degree difference would make quite the difference at the top of the ram... Thx for your time, I actually don't care much about the price, just that problem #1 gets solved so PM me, email me or just answer the question to your support about this issue.
I screwed up the bold text, any way to edit your comment at bit tech? edit: found it edit2: is there a way to edit the post without going into the forums, when you post using the quick comment if you understand me?
Haven't read the rest of this thread, but... I'd like optional angled connectors. Many boards now have built in 90 degrees sata connectors - why not leave them in the plane of the board, and have an optional connector that plugs straight onto them (either in sets of two, or as a whole 6/8) that turns 90 degrees? This would be more flexible for people cable-tidying. Similarly for the power connections, especially the 24 pin ATX power, a 90 degree connector to point it towards the edge of the board would aid cable tidying... and for the USB and front panel connections. These would be simple and cheap (like the Q-connect at the moment), and optional if they're not best for your case layout.
Wow I like that Q-Connect-like SATA adapter. I was going to say I really liked the Q-Connects, it helps on figuring out the connectors without referring to the manual. I would really like some better help. PLL voltage. What is that? I probably have to boot up my machine, go online, and double check before I adjust it. Oh wait, one value should be within .5 of VDIMM? Man, I wish I remembered that name. Motherboard info would be super (something like press ? for additional help if you can't fit it on the right side), but even info in the manual would be an improvement. Dual BIOS would be a nice improvement on all boards. I would want more stylistic heatsinks. The RoG heatsinks are gorgeous, I would like to see some better styling on the boards right under RoG (I know nobody cares about the $50 boards) More streamlined tools. I've got an Asus board at work that has the energy savings utility where it tells you how much CO2 you've produced. The UI is a little heavy. Overclocking utilities that work consistently would be good. EVGA did a very good job with their E-Leet utility. One last thing: More Linux support! At work we bought a P6T6 v1 board since it had SAS, plus a bunch of PCIe 16x slots. However, the SAS at time of release didn't work in RHEL! I saw some iffy reports of people getting it to work in Ubuntu (some alpha release), but I needed stable. We still ended up buying near 40 boards, but we're using SATA and not SAS like we wanted. Several of our boards had issues with sound in Linux until a few updates later. Is it so hard to use a Linux compatible chipset? I can go down http://www.linux-tested.com/ and everything will work in Red Hat, except for sound. I don't care about the utilities (though that would be very nice!) but I want chipset compatibility with stable boards, especially one targeted at Workstation users. Supermicro does this very well but they primarily have server boards.
Got a few points: 1. As many people have said, right angled 24 pin and 8 pin power connectors. Try and have them next to each other so you don’t have to have so many holes for cable management. 2. Try and position all the ports for wires coming into and out of the board near each other, so, for each example, the front case connectors are all right next to each other instead of across the whole bottom of the board, with the other connectors along three sides. 3. More colour co-ordinated boards. Boards like the bloodrage, MSI ecliplse plus, and the EVGA SLI LE are selling due to the fact that they look good in cases. High level boards are the ones that are going into very good mods and people often go with other manufacturers other than ASUS because ASUS's boards, although they don’t exactly look bad, they don’t really look amazingly co-ordinated and planned like some others.
My final entry suggestion... The 8 pin and 24 pin atx mobo connectors could come as 6" units in the box with built in surge protection to protect the motherboard from any power spikes. You can get these for graphics cards so I don't see why they arnt possible to make for motherboard connectors. A premium of £15-20 on top of a high end board would be worth the money if you could guarentee protecting it from any un planned power cuts. Saves spending loads of exenpensive surge protectors and would also protect your pc from a psu failure which a standard surge protector wouldn't. Andy
how about a board that comes in layers/sections? Ie a layer for cpu & chipset, layer for memory slots and a layer for all other stuff. This could be good in many ways, for a start it would be good for itx style case mods and would certainly make routing cables easy. Cases could also be compartmentalised much more efficiently too. If you happened to have an accident and blow your board you could replace only the relevant parts. When upgrading you could replace the ram slots (for when ddr4 is inevitably released) or the cpu socket for your new cpu and think of the crazy folding farms you could build by adding PCIE slots.
The ExpressGate have got some real potential. The idea of being able to download programs/extensions/plug-ins is also great. Just remember to model it on the one Mozilla built for FF instead of Apple where they seem to control which user-made programs can be uploaded. Since the ExpressGate is Linux based, linux programs could be used in ExpressGate? I know the onboard memory dedicated to EG is limited, but turning a onboard USB header into two USB connectors could solve this. If users want to download programs, all the have to do is buy a cheap USB stick and plug that sucka in. Also, please make EG able to be used as a media center. I would like it to use VLC player to access my NAS video collection. Hi-def video-output is ofcourse a must for media centers, hi-def sound-output would also be very welcome (optical?). Functionality is primary, looks secondary. One of the internal USB plugs could even be hosting a TV-tuner? Others feel free to steal my ideas, since I live in Denmark!
How about a heat sensitive Motherboard? You know the sort of thing....Changes color as it gets hotter/colder. Starts Black then goes blue then as it gets hotter to red. Would be interesting to see what parts of the mobo are getting hottest and whether your cooling is working in ya case. Ya board goes completely red then its 'Oh c**p' need more cooling time. Black/blue withe a little red......Yay! my cooling works This would also work for fittings instead of the motherboard. Heatsinks etc all coated with a heat sensitive coating.
