Thoughts on the older style of GN video? Grab a GN 'Debug' Coaster Pack on the Store! Use code 'BUTWHY' for 10% off! store.gamersnexus.net/products/gn-drink-debug-coaster-pack-4-custom-3d-coasters-100x100mm-4x4 while code is active Watch our latest news video to learn about motherboards with cables on the back: ruclips.net/video/tBxBUIoeNYo/видео.html
2018 I got my Asus Crosshair VII (x470) for 250€. The AM5 X670 Crosshair costs now 750€! Triple the price in 4 years is insane! Also, JayzTwoCents mentioned that they aren't even well made and keep dying, so I'll be skipping Asus motherboards for now.
@@lyianx Memory and CPUs are actually reasonably priced,ddr4 is dirt cheap ddr5 is 130$ for 32GB so not bad either,you can get away with 150-300$ CPUs everything beyond sees minimal gains.
Motherboard pricing really has gone absolutely insane, boards should not have doubled, tripled or even more in less than 3yrs to 5yrs, I'm running an Asus X570 Formula as I loved the built in screen and overall look of the board but unfortunately has a water block that I have no need for, still cools amazingly well passively through. But if I want the X670e Hero, so a board with no waterblock I have to pay significantly more, I mean what in the actual hell!
The debug LED is treated as a premium option. They used to be on every cheap ass motherboard back in the day. The freaking things only cost pennies to add to a motherboard.
Used to be you could use a debug card but they took that away too. (edit - could they develop a standard to use the 'bios flashback' port for debug code echo? it is clearly initialised before boot)
This. There's no excuse for MOBO's these days to NOT have at least a debug LED readout, with basic error indicators to give you an idea of where to start troubleshooting, which is still not as ideal as a code readout, which gives particular's about your issue.
Two points: 1) debugging features probably reduce RMAs and save money 2) Ask the engineers to code errors into the RGB LEDs that are on the board for aesthetics. If you have 8 RGB LEDS and you just stick to just off, red, green, and blue, you can encode 4^8 states, and you have your (somewhat inconvenient) error code readout.
You still have to worry about not explaining it in the manual, though. They've been doing it with beep codes for quite some time now, much to my frustration.
My motherboard is somewhat like that. Its not RGB but there is a labelled LED on each section of the board. During POST they are all on, and turn off as each part passes the test. Whatever stays lit is what is preventing your boot up.
@@freedustinhe covers that in the video. They're better than nothing but only point you to "RAM" or "CPU" not exactly what the RAM or CPU is failing at.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. ...
As a gamer and general PC user, I for one am happy we have GN to act as a voice for the majority of us. This 'rant' was really just 24 minutes of good old fashioned common sense. Thanks Steve.. please keep doing what you guys do, we all benefit from it.
Please dear God more of this. This has been one of my favorite GN videos to date. Steve roasting products and manufacturers is always my favorite thing. I'm still recovering from when Steve said Thermaltake pulled air from the 4th dimension using a time cube alongside a tesseract. 😂
I loved that line. I remember it so well, because I spit out a bunch of water I was drinking when Steve said it. ...Shout out to Corsair for making the K70 keyboard not mind a little water. :D
Thanks for this video! 6 years ago I built a computer using an Asus ROG Hero board that I got for $215. This year as I was building my new computer I was so confused why the same product line, the hero boards, were $600. I still can't for the life of me figure out what makes it a $600 board. Bought an ROG strix board instead that had all the same features for $250. Board manufacturers have lost their minds.
Are you sure it wasn't a rogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrog?
I am in a very similar situation. I bought the crosshair hero 6 and loved that board. 7 segment saved my ass multiple times and the army of USB ports became something I relied on. Just recently went to upgrade the CPU and board and found to get those features were just stupid money. Several hundreds of dollars just wasn't worth it.
@@PigeonDetective yeah that's the one thing I wish my new board had is the 7 segment display. Now it only has the 4 color LEDs. I get nervous when it sits on the ram LED because I have no idea if it is training the memory or if I broke something!
Why wouldn't you have just gone with a different brand at that point? You still gave them your money after seeing they are willing to markup a board by $400 for literally nothing. I spent $150 on a Gigabyte Aorus Elite board that is 99% the same as the $250 Strix. Steve didn't even mention how Asus is becoming junk with their new boards being some of the most unreliable out of all the brands' offerings. I saw for the first time this year people using the phrase "don't get an Asus" when making motherboard recommendations, _that's_ how you know times have changed.
The amount of fleecing motherboard manufacturers do now over features that were ubiquitous in the mid range from 2005-2015 is disgusting. I remember in 2010; you could buy an Asrock X58 Extreme 3 with the brand new USB and Sata 3, a beefy vrm, a above average onboard audio, and more pcie lanes and usb ports than you could shake a stick at for $125usb when it was new. That was consider a value highend board, and it was not unique back then.
Love how it was the engineers who told him "not our call, make noise so we can tell them to change things", just shows that engineers are real people while marketing and execs are not.
Bean counters care about min-maxing profits, engineers care about making a good product that meets the specifications. (Including the specifications set but the bean counters.)
@@Fractal_32 I just bought a bunch of stuff in the last couple of weeks. The guys who met my specs "min-maxxed" their profits on those transactions. The jackasses who were too busy painting things pretty colors to make a product that actually does it's fucking job, did not. The problem is not bean-counters. The problem is idiots and assholes, some of whom might coincidentally happen to be the same people who are also the bean-counters.
These companies don't have engineers anymore. They have toddler brain scammers who steal things then cobble together something and call it a day. And it all shows that from the websites up to actual devices in majority all being created and operated by braindead people, while the end consumer in places like US is the worst and buys any trash there is, even people who starve they are hooked on these garbage devices. Chain reaction that created a new market that sells garbage.
so if they're not real people what are they? to play devils advocate the measure for success in their respective jobs are very different. the engineer doesn't need to give a frak about profitability. he won't lose his job or bonus if that sector is lacking.
trust me if an x570 tomahawk "elite" came out at 280$-299$ with a debug code LED they would have sold like hotcakes. The engineers knew this....and would have enjoyed such concepts playing out in the market/for their respective companies....yet theres a WIDE gap/margin between the ideal vrm/temp operating boards w.o debug LED...and and the would be "FLAGSHIPS"
It feels so bad. I was in the market for some forced upgrades last December (my GPU died) and no matter how I looked at it I felt robbed. And I know this video is about computers, but I can't help but feel the same way in other aspects of my life currently, from grocery shopping, to housing, to PCs. I wonder if past generations felt like this on a daily basis as well...
@@jersak22 Indeed, I had to buy the CPU and Motherboard on monthly payments just to afford it and at least get some discounts during black friday sale. Ended up getting a X670E crosshair hero as 1)at the time no motherboard that has a decent amount of m.2 slots had two v3.x internal usb headers for the front i/o on the H500M. 2)Didn't have lame ass PCI-E 5.0 bifurication where M.2 slots would take lanes from the x16 slot. Also have the debug features that I needed give AM5 is radically different compared to AM4 and boy did I need those debug features. There were countless times i thought the motherboard had died on me but it turned it was going through ridiculously long boot check and restore process / memory training. There were also times when I went abit too aggressive on the undervolt although it would warm boot fine. But on the second cold shut down it would literally fall into a coma. Only clearing the CMOS several times via the jumper would bring it back. Later bios updates have solved most of the issues but there is one issue still not resolved - the AMD overclocking menu does nothing, all settings have to be set under the extreme tweaker menu.
@@jersak22 It might've been this bad in the early 90s for just computers, but the last time it was this bad just generally was shorly before The Great Depression. If things keep going this way, we might just see an economic collapse.
I’ve been saying this for a while. A easy debug display make troubleshooting so much easier and the cost to the manufacturer is negligible. It should be a standard feature on all consumer boards above $150, which is basically all motherboards now.
yeh it's insane that most am5 mobo at 250 to 350 don't have the debug error code screens on them.. for example the am5 asus strix gaming f mobo costs around 450 in the UK, and dose not have the debug error code screen, where as the strix gaming f board from the pervious generation the x570 gaming f mobo had this feature while being £150 cheaper. it's a joke that to get this feature on these newer boards you need to spend 450 plus which is a joke.
Glad to see someone speak up on this. Recently I was shocked to discover that the closest thing to a debug 7 segment display on a final-generation SP3 board I was troubleshooting was an arrangement of 8 red/green LEDs that spelled out in binary the last 2 hex digits of the POSTcode. Surely server motherboard manufacturers can afford to do better than that.
Was on call with a server manufacturer because their insanely overpriced shit box was DOA. I have a box from 2008 with a pop-out LED-board that tells you what is wrong with red and green lights. 2022 brand new piece of kit, single green LED. I pray they do not find out RJ45 jacks without LEDs are 4ct cheaper!
At least you have o code to work with.. The EZ debug LED makes the process just frustrating. Four LED's which tell you where the problem could be, never noticed a flash code on those things...
This comment is the key part of the rant that I feel Steve missed: 8 LEDs would do the same thing as two 7-segment displays and they could put the decode information in the manual (since they're going to ship it with one) and resolves two engineer's complaints: the 7-segment can still be premium and the identical LEDs would have bulk purchase price reduction.
Omg finally someone adressing this issue, it somehow always got worse and worse for no reason whatsoever. A few years ago at least most mid to higher end mobo had these debug displays
it's because of jews and freemasons creating problems to distract people away from real problems. they also have a quota of suffering they need to put into the world to keep people irritated and as slaves. irritated people are easier to control also
I hadn't even noticed the trend until I built my second pc like five years later. First motherboard was like $100 and had the LED debug tool. Really useful feature. New PC the motherboard cost me almost $200 and didn't have an LED readout. It just had the traffic lights, which has solved literally zero problems for me so far. Woulda been real nice when the damn thing was boot-looping on me.
I am very glad you tackle and publicize these seemingly minor issues. It's a creeping complacency in the consumers of this industry that must be stopped. We must stand our ground and demand our products do not diminish in quality over time. We do not want to end up like the lightbulb business.
itd just hurt them to cherry pick like this, because even ppl with the money are just gonna avoid them because they cant grasp or have no use for a feature packed board.
@@GamersNexus dell would bring this to the table, count on that option in the configurator: debug option yes (*) no ( ) upgrade cost: 20 $ 20 if it is on sale ofc, 50 $ if not
@@scudsturm1 LOL no way Dell would be that basic - they would direct you to an operator to sell you the debug code, an upgrade to what the f it actually means, and an upsell to Dell ProSupport Plus (TM) subscription since you have your card out anyway.
I can't agree more. I got a Gigabyte z690 last year at 260€ with a 7-segment display. Just for the lols I searched online, and NO z790 today has the 7-segment, except a 600€ motherboard. This is absolutely insane!
Even better is when the low end mobos instead put a "ez debug led" on it, and all it tells you is "something went wrong with your cpu good luck figuring it out lol" Pretty sure a Q-Code 7 segment display would not be more expensive, in fact, the logic already has to be there, it needs to either set a "cpu error" flag when a specific thing goes wrong, or straight up compares a return code and gives out a signal to an LED depending on that... Just hook that code up to a 7-segment display instead...
Yeah true, @Nicnl my first build has an AX370 Gaming 5 mobo, with a 7 segment debug in situ! That board was around $160ish! Then I get a replacement board this year for $170+ (a superb deal tho) X570 Steel Legend WiFi AX and it has no debug codes and highly doubt LEDs!! 😢😢😢 We certainly need to rant MORE!!! Steve I 100% back your rant! Let's rage against this Co.s that are making silly marketing/sales decisions! What a $1½ rip-off.... *ahem SCAM!
@@tacokoneko Same!! I recently just built my Plex server with it. I love that board and I'm so glad I got to reuse it. In fact, I've already used the debug display 3 times now since rebuilding it. Twice while building it and once while I was out of town the wife said Plex was down, so she read me the code and I walked her through what to do 🙃
A functioning and dependable infrastructure doesn't make money. When corporate chooses short term stupidity over the higher end option that will pay off over 3 times its value in its lifespan over the "cheap" option. Long term development isn't anywhere near as valuable as short term quarterly gains. Remember these people make more money than you.
In The Lost Interview that's the reason Jobs said that Xerox failed. They had it all, but reached a saturation point where engineers were pushed out of the decision making forums due to salespeople being the ones who could increase profits at that stage. Leading to a slow decline in quality and dominance.
Thanks for this. I followed because I wanted to get a PC but didn't know anything about brands, components, etc. I also had the impression that more expensive meant more better. Videos like these are a great help to the ignorant like myself. I greatly appreciate it.
1:17 Gotta love the engineers, I feel their pain. They want to do right by the customers they make boards for, but marketing and other teams get in their way. Thank you GN for standing with the engineers on this one.
@@keithw4920 "members of PCMR" yeah, no. Doubt those engineers are as childish as the average PCMR member. You should instead say they are PC enthusiasts.
I heard a quote from boat reviewer "you'll never find an engineer who is ok cutting corners." Engineers, generally speaking, are the most passionate people in their fields, but as in the rest of life, money beats intelligence.
Literally a couple months later ASRock came out with $350 Taichi lite boards with 7 segs on em. I got $20 says this video had at least something to do with it.
Thank you for making this video. I went through this struggle a couple years ago trying to find a decent motherboard with a 7 segment display. I ended up sacrificing and got an MSI board that had 3 led debug lights. It was so frustrating to troubleshoot when the time came, I'll never do that again. I really hope manufactures listen to this video.
In theory, I don't have a problem with the LED debug lights. I mean, when it comes right down to it, it's just a visual version of the debug beeps of old and those were basically the same limited variables of CPU, RAM, GPU etc. So I applauded MSI for at least trying to bring back those indicators in some form back when they standardized debug LEDs on their boards. My only problem with them was they were absolutely tiny and scrunched together in use. And the LED was so bright, it was often hard to tell which light was actually on. Especially from a distance, or poor eyesight, or without a flashlight to drown out the LED. If MSI had at least color coded the debug LEDs, it would've been far easier to use in practice. Yes, I agree a 7 segment display is the ideal means of debugging system issues, but I'd still much rather have the debug LEDs than nothing at all. I was livid when board manufacturers got rid of debug speakers without providing anything to replace it across all boards (debug codes still only being on high end boards) years ago back when UEFI first started rolling out. So I still want to see debug LEDs at the very least on all boards that don't have 7 segment displays. But I also think 7 segment displays should be automatically included on any motherboard over $200-$250. I don't care what the "relative" market considers high end these days. I still consider any motherboard over $200 expensive and I don't see any excuse for an expensive motherboard not to provide debug codes. He talks about "back in his day", that was my day too (I've been building computers for over 20 years) and I still can't believe how expensive motherboards have become. It wasn't that long ago that you could get a high end motherboard for $160-$180. My last motherboard cost me $340 and I thought that was insane. The most I'd ever spent on a motherboard by far. My next motherboard is going to cost me $600 for the functional spec I'm looking for. I still can't believe I'm actually going to pay that, but I just don't see a better option in the cheaper price brackets that meets my requirements. I used to tell people they should never pay more for their motherboard than they do for their CPU. But these days, that's all I see. Most motherboards these days have all become obscenely more expensive than the CPUs they support and I still think there's something wrong with that trend.
I'm in the market to upgrade, i want a R7 7800X3D (just waiting for benchmarks but the decision is pretty much made at this point... this or wait until next lineup refresh), i was already scouting for Motherboards. It is ridiculous. I have like 4 simple requirements. - optical port for 5.1 surround system (has gotten super rare! what the hell? do you think i buy a new 5.1 Surround System because you decide to change plugs? this is no more headphone jack on phones all over again) - debug LEDs (the simple ones, the segmented ones are priced out of my range already... wtf?) - 4+ SATA ports for my SSDs. - 2-3 PCI-E Slots more than just the GPU. (one of them for a soundcard because you don't have optical port anymore, i guess) - it would be nice if it was black and had some CLASSY none-cringe RGB (like, no ebay car tuning dragons 'n shit please). aaaand with just that i'm already down to like 3 - 5 boards in the entire AM5 range of boards. but hey... at least i get FIVE M.2 ports for my ONE M.2 Drive on almost all boards. I'm all decked out now in SATA drives, by the time i got 5 M.2 drives they probably will replace it with an M.3 port and declare this stuff obsolete again.
@@ZeroB4NG I was pretty much the same. I also need a toslink for my speakers. I actually needed 6 SATA ports until a couple of my drives died last month and ultimately decided if I have to buy new drives anyway, I might as well transition them to m.2. But there are enough features on the Asus X670E Hero (such as 2 USB4 ports) that I ultimately decided to stick with that board (for now, I'm still open to considering new options if they appear on the market before I'm ready to buy). I ultimately chose to get a motherboard that had a good sound card on it that included toslink because a lot of boards, as soon as you install a card on one of the other PCIE slots, they cut your PCIE x16 slot lanes to 8x and I wanted to avoid that if possible. If there was no way around it, I would've been fine, but I wanted to avoid it if possible. I also picked the Hero because none of the m.2 slots shared PCIE lanes with the top x16 slot like some boards. So I can fill all 4 M.2 slots if I want to without having to worry about my x16 slot's lanes being halved. As far as the RGB though... It doesn't really bother me. Mainly because you can change the colors to whatever you want, and even if you don't want them, they're really easy to turn off altogether (apart from maybe system boot). But beyond that, RGB I've always felt to be a non-issue, so I don't really make it a major factor in my buying decisions. The functions are far more important to me than the form. I'll still try to make it look good, but the function always has to take precedence for me.
@@ZeroB4NG things like the SATA ports are part of the southbridge so the lack of available ports are Intel's/AMD's doing. There are M.2 cards with SATA ports that use a JMicron chipset which work well and you can keep with the SATA drives. Those 5 M.2 ports filled with adapters would give you 20 HDD connections.
Debug LEDs used to be so common that I took them for granted. I've been building for a long time and it feels like the end of an era when something so useful is often absent.
@@volvo09 They aren't completely gone, the Aorus B650m motherboard has debug LED's while only being 185 dollars. Those debug LED's saved my ass the first time it was booting up. Since it takes forever for cheap AM5 motherboards with high ram to boot up for the first time. If it wasn't for the presence of the LED's then I would have tottaly thought it was dead, and either RMA'd it or just eaten the cost. But the presence of the debug LED's helped to convince me that the board wasn't dead. And was just taking a while to boot in. So I went to the grocery store, put away the grocies, then went to the bathroom. And then . . . it was finally done booting up for the first time. And after that first AM5 long boot the board has worked like a dream. Long AM5 boot up times on cheap boards with high ram counts does suck. But debug LED's are a blessing.
my asus rog strix z690-A has the LED's but also at a 350 euro pricepoint you'd figure at that kind of money for a mobo you'd get a dr debug with it : /
Thanks Steve. Basically someone needed to say this out loud. Corporations like these will literally snag up any little excuse for keeping prices high. One day very soon no one will be able for afford anything...how will that help their margins when that happens.
I would like to add that one other thing motherboard makers are slowly omitting is the block diagram or system architecture diagram. These can be helpful in troubleshooting PCIe issues especially when those PCI lanes are shared. Look at Asrock-they are only having these in their higher end boards. Gigabyte is a bit random as even some of their enthusiast Aorus range don;t have these block diagrams.
I fully support what you're saying. We used to have POST code displays in 775 days on most enthusiast boards, and for top tier (I think it was P5E3 Premium or P5E64 WS Evo) ASUS even had a separate dongle with power/reset buttons and debug code you could plug into the board. The debug displays were common till Haswell era, but that's when RGB madness started. Out of other useful features that boards used to have that were completely abandoned (or pushed into extreme segment), because they're not sexy: - power/reset buttons, great stuff for quickly testing without a case - proper dual BIOS, not like things Gigabyte did when you had 2 chips on the PCB but it switched randomly, or the stuff from Asus where a part of code is shared between both bioses and when you change major ME version on one IOS, the other stops working - saving BIOS profiles to USB - enhanced diagnostics such as embedded MemTest
Yes, you're passionate about it, but you're also RIGHT. I spent three days chasing down a fault, replacing the CPU and motherboard TWICE only to find out it was a PCI-E to SATA add-in card that was causing a failure to POST. The only reason I found out was that I replaced the cheap motherboard I was using with a more expensive one that had a segmented POST code display. So now I have two motherboards that are 100% okay that I can't use for the moment.
@@bookshelffury Of course you bring it down to minimum config. I introduced parts piece by piece, and it passed POST every time. Then it'd just randomly fail after everything was back in, forcing me to start over. It's not always clear cut, and the part isn't always bad all the time. With a debug display, I at least knew where to start looking when it failed POST.
Agree completely here, motherboard manufacturers keep removing actual useful features and adding on stupid tacky ones to jack up the prices to absurd levels. I'd greatly appreciate the return to x58-x79 era boards.
Motherboard prices are getting more insane than GPU prices and the one thing i can't get is how can people buy them? I mean is silly but i get why one is so obsessed with 4K-ray tracing in full detail at 120 fps that makes him want to throw like 1500 for a GPU. BUT A MOTHERBOARD? Really? Why? 500 and 1000 for a motherboard? It's so pointless. I literally have a 60 buck motherboard in my system that went for 9 years and still going.
@@SIPEROTH thats the problem. you can make a 60 bucks motherboard that works on a basic level (especially with the efficient new cpus) and those dont make a lot of money. So Manufacturers try to upsell you to the highest price possible by removing basic features off a cheap mobo. "Sure you can use this 100 buck mobo but you aint getting this fancy USBC connector or XMP or more than 2 USB 3.0 ports"
Now the AMD and NVIDIA shills need to understand this is the exact same crap those two are doing to the GPU market. Way more money for a bit better performance. line up boys!
Most people don't care about the debug LED until something breaks and then have to tear their hair out trying to look at blinking lights. When I last upgraded I only looked at a motherboard which had an led display for error codes. Things break over time and it's always useful to have to be able to easily see what the issue is.
The debug LED is SUPER SUPER useful when your system won't boot. Honestly IMO no motherboard over $100 should be without it. It's such a simple thing that is so useful. I wish someone made an add on debug LED or something like that. Not sure if that is possible though.
Exactly. My ****ing raspberry pi picos have a debug LED on them. That's a 4-dollar-including-breakout-board microcontroller. I'm working on building a battery for my e-bike that will have a debug LED on its control circuitry (because it'll be pico-based). I can wire up a little blinky gag-gift circuit for one of my nieces, and it'll have a debug LED on it. Why is it more cost-effective for me to build an automatic sprinkler controller for my garden that has a debug LED, than it is to get the same feature when building my multi-thousand-dollar desktop workstation? A part that goes inside the tower case, behind my monitor, having a built-in programmable rainbow light-show that I have never and will never use is NOT more important than my computer being able to do computer-ey things like, ya know, booting up.
T. sensor headers is another useful thing that has become rare to see on low to mid tier motherboards, not everyone needs them, but when you do they're really nice to have.
Debug features would also be great for new builders. I’m fairly new and both builds I’ve done so far I had a booting issue. It took me hours to figure out what was wrong. I had no idea what I was doing wrong and it took many hours of research to fix my issues.
This video needs to be everywhere for everyone to see. the industry feels completely out of control with pricing and until people stop paying prices because "that's just what it costs" it may never stop.
The thing is people aren’t going to give up their hobby in protest, and we’re at the point now where you just can’t play new games without the upgrade. I think a lot of people have already held out against the urge to upgrade because of the pricing situation, and the longer you hold on the higher the prices get. Inflation is always a positive number, prices rarely fall or ‘go back down’. Instead you wait a little longer than usual yet eventually cave, uncomfortably handing over more than you should as Steve mentions.
@@AUserName-fv8zjI mean, if you’re smart you can still have a relatively affordable experience - heavily discounted RDNA 2 cards have been genuinely good value ever since the GPU shortage ended.
Facts for the sales people: every time I've been presented with choosing between two similarly priced boards, and one of them had seven segment debug display, I've chosen that one. It's a really helpful feature when your system won't POST, which happens sometimes (sometimes during the build, but also it can spontaneously happen years after you've finished the build), it can happen, and it's a useful feature.
@@fuzzybabyducks7878 I have one of those, in some drawer somewhere where I won't find it when I need it. They could just build it right into the motherboard for essentially no extra cost.
I like the idea of having a separate header for a specific debug tool for the pros. I do feel there should be standards on every motherboard: cmos clear button, bios flashback, and standard single plug for the front panel
Should be just a USB output that your phone can read through an app, and give you a telemetry output after which exact function the system freezed/stopped. Btw a Raspberry pie is about 10-20 bucks and can give you full screen, having that instead of the shit Realtek audio that still makes bogus/unnecessary noise would make my day. Audio DAC/splitter/preamp should anyway not be inside the computer case but better in the monitor or HDMI amplifier or other external audio device.
My main gripe with motherboard manufacturers is that they now demand over $1000 for their flagship boards which probably only cost them maybe $200 more to make over their lower-tier boards. It's crazy that we now live in a time where the motherboards have become more expensive than the cost of the processor you're putting in the board. The messed up thing is that these companies will not provide any decent support, even if you do buy their higher-tier models.
Easy solution: don't buy. There is nothing in these expensive motherboards that is worth the price tag. Overclocking is dead and extra connectivity is rarely worth it.
And long ago it had already bothered me that I cannot get a sane board with decent practical features like enogh I/O without all the stupid shit crammed into it, too. Product segmentation is iconic capitalist scourge. It's basically 'feature hostage taking'.
My take is by how AMD am4 survived 5 gens the manufacturers want to their money upfront. Expecting the user to keep the same board for next 8 years or so
Seven-segment displays have helped me on every single build I've done in the last fifteen years. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that it's included on every mid-range-plus board.
especially when taking into account that when applied at a large enough scale, the actual cost of it should be roughly equal to including the little error-code-beeper thingamajig. Edit: effing hell, only now reached the part of the video where i hear that apparently even those aren't included anymore? Which case has them mounted in there nowadays? compared to about 5yrs ago where every case still had one integrated and they STILL supplied an auxiliary one with the mobo... what the actual heck.
honestly it's about time someone spoke out about this and it makes me happy that you did. 7seg debug displays are by far the most useful things I've seen on a board to troubleshoot problems and it honestly makes me miss my old Phenom II rig with an MSI 890FXA-GD70 motherboard. that board had the debug display and a freaking dial to OC. sadly after many years it succumbed to that motherboard's one problem, the FF-d1 error loop and barely boots anymore. but besides all of this you barely see debug displays anymore and i was surprised they were still a thing. that pricing is absolutely ridiculous though and i hope companies start to add this feature to more boards after hearing what you have to say.
It is insane, my 939 abit board had the 7segment, sli, a freaking frontal panel for info, oc and other shit with a built screen, more cables and shit that I needed, PLUS a pc internal speaker and it didnt cost more than midrange cpu’s. Nowadays I have to keep recycling that old ass pc internal speaker each time I change the motherboard.
I work in IT. I've been thinking about these same things and thought maybe it's just me being grumpy and having a larger than average sample size to see issues with. That being said, it's nice to hear others feel the same about current motherboard trends. Great video as always.
If even one mobo manufacturer would commit themselves to being enthusiast friendly and really supporting these small but meaningful QOL features at a reasonable price point they would have my loyalty for a LONG time and they'd definitely be my go-to for any builds for friends and family because then I can actually help them when something goes wrong without it being a giant pain in the arse.
its nice that were all being entertained and nobodys getting mad, being entertained really helps us with staying focused and making ourselves being heard
More of this please. I love the direction the channel has taken however there is plenty of room for content like this still, it’s sorely needed. Back to you Steve.
I noticed this as well when I built my current rig in 2020. The $300 motherboard that I ended up purchasing couldn’t support the 4x8GB config of 3600CL18 RAM that I purchased to go with it. To add to Steve’s frustration, a lot of entry level motherboards don’t even include a speaker for beep codes anymore. It’s honestly insane. There is virtually no way to perform any sort of informed debugging/troubleshooting anything in the entry level. Edit: And Steve just covered it. I’m glad I’m not the only person who is equally frustrated with motherboards right now.
Just love such debug codes ... but way more important is to write down what that darn code is. I'm just now struggling with a TRX40 motherboard and the C5 memory error (at least the Asus motherboard shows a memory logo next to it) - but ... wherever I look there's no explanation to that code...
@@VenaNocta It's a memory training code. I assume you're using the Zenith II, that and Threadripper in general is notoriously finicky for the CPU being seated properly. I would clean the underside of the CPU, make sure the socket isn't damaged at all, and try each memory channel one by one making sure the RAM and slot are clean and seating the module several times to make sure there is good contact. I've had that error on several ASUS TRX40 boards and it always ended up working eventually.
Finally, someone talk about this, it makes me plain mad at this point and make my professional AND personal life more difficult for no reason. The MB that include useless features but not a freaking debug function seems to be unavoidable this days if I want a normal price. Thank you GN for doing this.
I also miss dual bios options, would've been nice so you could support more Ryzen chips for example on the same board, rather than eventually updating to the point where some would lose support. For a more practical reason, it's good in case you mess up a BIOS update and need a backup.
i also like it bc covid work from home etc....ppl could have a config for work that is legit/boots etc....well tuned....and a OC bois bsod etc....ram tuned to the limit setup...for "GAMING" when those sessions AAA sessions or benchmark score climbing boot sessions are going to be what that system is going to encounter....and if you have stability issues with the tune bc said end user is trying max out their AAA experience on 4k or QHDUW, or a maxed out timing tune for fabric. If theres ever any windows/power profile etc updates that could lead to stability issues with the OC profile/system...you can just flip to bios B/vanilla to handle some work if/when needed as a mandatory priority....then flip back to A to re-configure the OC for a new bios update, or new windows update that subsequently leads to stability issues with a pre-determined OC of prior.
Well you don't need dual bios to support more Ryzen chips. The issue with last generation is that manufacturers wanted to save a quater of a cent and went with 16 mb BIOS rom chips. And that they build the most messed up UEFI with like "gamer" pngs for everything.
holy crap thank you so much for this video. I have been looking for am5 motherboards and thought I was going crazy seeing so many basic features missing from even $400 motherboards, its genuinely getting rediculous. we definitely need more unhinged steve.
Same! I am in the middle of a build right now and wanted to enjoy 10gb Ethernet and at least 1 5.0 pcie slot for when I can get my hands on a new 5.0 m.2 SSD - couldn’t find a board under 500 that had these features!
ROG seem to be pretty well balanced for value with its motherboards. When choosing my new AM5 ATX mobo, I had 2 ROG mobos out of 4 options, the only other better mobo that wasnt ROG was priced out because it simply too expensive for what it was offering. There were better EATX mobos but they were too big and far above price range. Its mental how expensive some mobos are now, and what they lack. Oh and shit dont get me started on lack of connections or pcie slots RIP
Just skip AM5, there's absolutely nothing on the market worth buying into the BS on display by all the manufacturers trying to squeeze every single dollar out. They need to learn a lesson. If you must buy AM5, The B650E Tai chi, and live mixer boards strike a very good balance between functionality and cost.
I appreciate this. Finding a MoBo that had reasonable features for under $200 was such a pain when I recently helped a friend piece together a build with a $1k budget. In 2023, I feel there is no excuse for the mid-range mobos to exclude features like debug codes and on-board reset switches. Perhaps even dual BIOS and BIOS flashback for when things go wrong. It would kinda be like buying a 2023 car that didn't have power windows.
@@sirsneakybeaky I totally get that. If omitting these features nets me up to a $60 discount on a mid-ranger, then yes it makes a lot of sense to omit them. Personally, I'm not convinced that the savings would be a significant portion of the overall board cost. I could certainly be wrong though. My buddy may not use those features, but if I was going to be the one to troubleshoot, I would like those nice-to-haves assuming it doesn't add a significant amount to the overall board cost. To me it seems like these troubleshooting features have been around long enough to have trickled down to the entry level considering some high-end components now have full-on color displays on them.
funny you should say that, because a similar thing happened to Kia and Hyundai recently, and it led to them being utterly humiliated for it. a Tik Tok video came out, showing that if you could open up the steering cover of a base model Kia or Hyundai, the ignition switch could fit inside a USB Type A male port (literally the one on every USB cable). With it, you could turn on the ignition and start the car and steal it. This being Tik Tok, the video went viral and stealing Kias became a challenge. It caused car theft in the US to basically double. Stealing Kias and Hyundais with a usb cable was so easy that not one, but TWO 11 year old children did it. Kias and Hyundais were so easy to steal LITERAL CHILDREN did it. It was a colossal embarrassment. the best part, and the reason why they deserved to be humiliated for this? The vulnerability could have been easily prevented by adding a super cheap security device in their cars. I think the part cost like $40. Basically peanuts for a car. Using this device is so obvious that in countries like Canada, its use in all new cars is mandated by law. In the US, purely for market segmentation, Kia and Hyundai decided to only put it in their higher end models and make it a premium feature
Funny you said that, the power window thing. Car manufacture literally software lock feature on car, and sell them back to customer with monthly subscription for years.
I was way out of the PC loop when I built a new one in 2021 and I was quite surprised to see that debug lights were only on high end motherboards. I was so genuinely confused and seeing this reminded me of that whole debacle.
Finally! I'm no longer the only person complaining about this! I started publishing articles about this a year ago, and not a soul listened to me. 20:45, That's actually a phenomenal idea. That way, instead of racing to remove all the PCIe lanes, they can actually leave them on the board and just make a clever attachment for the other things we'll want. I would love to have a POST display. RGB boards won't make or break me, but I'll admit that they're nice. Maybe without so much hogging space on the board, they can add more M.2 slots without depriving us of PCIe lanes when said slots are used [looking at *YOU,* MSI 😡], or limiting how many SATA SSD's we can add. Internal soundcards are coming back, soooooooooo - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Also, WiFi for PC gaming is catching on, so - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Interest in mGPU on the AMD side is coming back, soooo - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Some people are using PCIe for fast storage [NVME] expansions, so - yeah, more lanes would be good. I'm so sick of these corporations making things worse, charging more for them, and saying it's because they're better when they're actually not as useful. Motherboard manufacturers are why I refuse to upgrade to current gen. I'd much rather get more powerful components from last gen if I need an upgrade, and reserve the rest for simply upgrading my GPU's.
that really didn't stop till about 2016 into 2017, when we hit our first Crypto Push that caused PC parts to skyrocket, till then we mostly were getting better and cheaper every year up till then. It's been up and down since.
the problem is 2000s computer was dogshit in 2004 already, it was moving too fast. and nowadays you could argue that something like 2600k, a ~12 years old cpu is still good enough for office kinda job, youtube and some light gaming
Had to upgrade from X570 to X670E a few months ago. RMA'd a high tier X570 Aorus board and got a refund for almost 400 euros, had to actually pay extra to get a mid tier X670E Asus Strix board. *sigh*
@@tomzpl yeah exactly. we are paying more for hardware with potentially longer lifespans. I'm optimistic that my $200 R5 5600X won't bottleneck for my purposes for another decade.
Just checked Aliexpress, $0.28 for a 0.56" dual 7 segment display. If you buy two singles and slap em together, it's $0.18 total. Neither of those are bulk manufacturer pricing. The board still has to check for errors, so I can't imagine there's much overhead past the 20 cent display. There's really no reason for them to not include something so cheap and useful.
If only RUclips would let you like more than once! Love that GN makes these videos! As a builder, I hate they the MB makers have made the 7 segment only available on the "highend" boards. This should be a standard feature, though I would settle with Steve's accessory option if it were available. Hopefully the manufacturers open their eyes and make this a standard feature again soon. Great video GN!
Literally me this week > Pc doesn't start, listen for post beep > Oh no its not posting! > Wait no there's no speaker > Check the mobo box, no > Check the case box, no > Had to buy a speaker on amazon smh
That's not even remotely true. Supply and demand is literally economics 101. And GN is a company that wants to make money of off you. No matter what they say, they say it to make money. And it works.
@@DiahRhiaJones economics 101 is literally a made-up thing, voting with your wallet has never worked and that's exactly why corporations want people to believe it does
Are you saying that the profit motive is bad for consumers? Oh gosh, if only there were an alternative system where workers were in charge of what gets made...
Completely agree, the LED is so useful nowadays. I still remember the PC speaker spitting out Morse code for debug info. I still have a little speaker on a few of my machines and still love hearing that little 'beep' on post.
Same, I love my little "post successful" beep. Haha, I remember one time somebody brought their computer to work, they just build it and it wasn't working, they wanted to have the IT guy look at it. Went to show me what was wrong with it, I heard the little beep, and said "hey wait a minute, a single beep usually means everything is fine." Went around to the back of the computer and they had their video cable plugged into the motherboard instead of the graphics card. 😂 Thank you, little beep!
@@mjc0961 post beeps rock. I have a whole bag of those little speakers and I still put them in every computer I build and every computer I work on that doesn't have one gets one haha
You can still connect the little speaker to modern pc's, all motherboards have the pins for it. The speaker itself is like 2 usd and can get you out of most situations, and usually better than displays, since displays can be obstructed by cables/panels and you usually can hear the speaker. I still have mine, and its awesome.
Actually, there is a video from Bullzoid, where he comments that for AMD boards, a segment display is not particularly useful, and debug LEDs are sufficient. So I went for a 'mid-range' 300 € board, instead of a more expensive one with slightly better debugging. I thought of looking for that video, but since Bullzoid videos aren't well sorted, it would take too long.
I've still got a case with a proper cardboard-cone speaker in it. The other two machines have had little piezo ones added because the manufacturer (Silverstone to name and shame the guilty) cheaped out and didn't include them.
Debug display/ease of troubleshooting would DEFINITELY make me choose one board over another. Not even something I have to think about. So incredibly nice to have.
Maybe these people shouldn't build a PC if they couldn't handle a basic troubleshooting? You can use a 5 pin speaker to do a basic troubleshooting. 7 segment is not a panacea either, it is only as informative as the amount of error codes it has.
@@dat_21 I feel like the average person would be better able to look up the problem with an error code to look for, rather than having to try and remember a sequence of beeps from a speaker the computer probably didn't come with.
@@johnwolf2349 You can buy a small buzzer for a few bucks. Some motherboard have small LED lights too. 7 segment is not necessary at all. At best it will be easier to read, but as far as troubleshooting information goes it's not terribly useful.
@@dat_21 You're completely missing the point; a new PC builder isn't even going to know a motherboard speaker is a thing to begin with, let alone that it probably doesn't come with their board and they have to go buy one (for which they also probably won't know where to start looking for such a thing). You're clearly looking at this through your enthusiast glasses without even thinking about the ignorance of most new PC builders.
I will volunteer as a sidekick if Steve ever goes through with this supervillain business. 7-segment display has been one of the best features that has been added to motherboards
Actually, most boards DO have headers for external debug LEDs! These are called TPM/LPC headers. They still present that part of ISA allowing a connected device to read specific I/O port, which the BIOS writes the 8-bit POST code to. Same technology for 40 years, just the connectors changed several times. Motherboard manufacturers already diverted from standard ISA/PCI for which you could get a card for a few bucks. Now each one has a different LPC header, so they already planned FOR YEARS for you to make this video. Now each will sell their own POST card for $20, instead of you getting one from AliExpress for $2 and that working in all boards. Smart!
@@nathangamble125 I don't know a single person who uses external TPM even in an enterprise setting. TPM has been built into the CPU/board for a pretty long time now.
where would i find one for gigabyte b650? im fine with paying an extra $1 or even $20 - instead of paying double for the entire board. I just want the feature.
@@nathangamble125 Nowadays you get TPM built into the CPU, which security people prefer anyways. So the header was empty before and remains empty today. And it's not strange - TPM needs stable constant connection to the system bus, PCIe doesn't allow that (for power savings mostly), so what's the interface we can use that's already present on the board, with the smallest amount of pins for a new header? LPC! It's slow, it's ancient (25 years, emulating/encapsulating ISA, 42 years old :)), it's perfect! And from the beginning, by design (!), POST cards can use LPC, as long as you connect them correctly. According to Wikipedia, Intel has standardized an LPC header for POST cards, but of course manufacturers opted to each invent their own when reintroducing LPC as TPM headers.
It's funny that you mention the DIY/modular idea because once upon a time, ASUS actually had that. I have an old X58 ASUS P6T7 WS board and it doesn't have the debug code LED on the motherboard but it has a pin out interface (uses up TPM) that you can plug a small daughter board into it. The daughter board has debug code LED along with PWR and Reset buttons.
Dude, every time you do the "And you'd THINK they did this because of THIS reason.......... [no followup]", it gets me. Every time. Also, really felt you on "either he's losing it, or he's REALLY passionate"-> "Yes."
More of this please. I started building in the late 90s and the amount of RBG BS and other aesthetic BS I will never look at or care about because I'm not a teenager has grown dramatically. The only thing I care about looking at is what's on my screen.
My favorite is cheap, Chinese mouse, keyboard, headsets that are trash covered in RGB and "Gaming" logos that cost almost as much as a good quality one
They can color the mobo pcb whatever they want - green, brown, whatever's cheapest. My case will never need a window on it. The thing is going to sit tightly on a shelf where I will never ever look at it unless it has a problem.
Laughed out loud at the rant, but it's spot-on. I'm putting together my first new build in about a decade and the biggest shock was mobo prices. I ended up settling on that MSI Carbon board you highlighted because I wanted a 7-segment display and it was the cheapest Z790 I could find that had one! It costs twice as much as the most expensive mobo I've ever bought. Stuff is straight-up insane.
its honestly a joke, ugh try shopping for a new chair, I looked at 5-7 different sites and its all the same garbage just reskinned there is nothing of quality anymore!
They have, but at least you can get a board with quality vrms at a decent cost now. The problem is just knowing which one has them 😅 speaking of crap, I loved Wendell's video of the sonic the hedgehog mini itx board (iirc), where he managed to break off like half the leds on the back just by using his bare table as a work surface. Quality!
I mostly just buy ASRock or MSI Pro entry level Motherboards for Intel Platforms, because it isnt worth anymore to spend more unless you need better VRMs for overclocking or squeezing the last bit of Turbo a higher end CPU.
"As long as it's clear what it DOES work with" Yes, so much yes! Spoken straight from my heart as well, mate... even back in the day when I built my current system (i7 8700K, Z-370), I had to put in serious and genuine _research_ just to figure out what type, brand, and speed rating of RAM I can actually use with Board X or Board Y. Manufacturers should really be forced to make this as straightforward to find **and understand** as possible!
Yup, that's really annoying. I have Logitech Z5500 5.1 speakers, and all my audio jacks are full. So only input I have left is the case front mic socket.
The disappearing of debug LEDs was something that always disappointed me. Still remember back in 2013 when I bought my Gigabyte UD4H Z87 board, it not only had a debug LED, but also a power button that lit up when power was connected along with a bios reset button, which are features I really miss now. It seems like ever since the market shifted to "Gaming" oriented stuff, all these features became basically unobtainable for the budget limited builders
Yeah the debug display is one of the mandatory features for me. My X570 Aorus Master has one. I also like it when they can let you use it as a CPU temperature readout once booted.
Debug LEDs where included in b550 and b560 maybe not the screen but the LED that would narrow down the issue to memory or CPU where present. the fact that even a basic LED without the display is missing on some of the mid range boards is really annoying and making life difficult for a beginners.
@@volvo09 That's just it, isn't it? These are boards designed to be purchased by a wealthy father for their 13 year old brat who decides what to get by how cool, slick, and expensive something is going to look when they show it to their friends.
I love this. I'm used to rant videos being annoying, so the way you express your thoughts here are really important, and you nailed it. I genuinely want to know your personal and professional opinions about hardware, outside of reviews and performance charts, and I think your insight and outreach can make a difference when you bring up alternative solutions to these problems. I'd like to see more pieces like these across a lot of different topics.
My ASUS X570 has the debug LEDs and it’s just… so nice to hit the power button and know which stage of the boot it’s in. On the rare occasion I’ve had issues it shows me exactly where it got stuck. 10/10 feature I’d prefer to never buy a board without. I picked this board based on your reviews a few years ago, and I remember the debug display was one of the tipping points when you explained why it was handy.
He specifically explains why those debug LED's are garbage. Im sure its "so nice" to see it stuck on RAM only whenever you have an issue, and it must be even nicer to have to hold your hand against the glass to be able to see what is even lit up in the first place.
@@celeriumlerium8266 I can see the debug leds from a cross the room lol. No problem at all seeing them through the glass. Maybe that’s a bigger issue on smoked glass builds
When catering to a market filled with people who know next to nothing about actual performance and think that looking cooler means a better computer than something that runs anything you throw at it, these are all things that are bound to happen.
exactly, corporations always try to milk the customer, an informed customer is the last thing they want, and when you buy Apple it's already over for you
Yup. Edgy kids whose parents are paying for everything look at the "ROGROGROGROGROGROGROG" and "FOR THOSE WHO DARE FOR THOSE WHO DARE" and think "oooo this will make me such an edgy gaming gamer! Who cares it's a Z790 and I have a 5300g, I must buy!"
@@bigbubba0439 yeah i don't think its kids, its middle aged manchildren. kids don't have the money to blow on overpriced pc hardware. a trend i've seen is that people who have never built a computer before, see how easy it is, and buy one and treat it as if they are experts at building computers. but being a newbie, they make amateur mistakes and nonsensical long-term plans they don't want to admit they made because they spent a lot of money on it. I'm not trying to gatekeep here but spending $3000 on a white computer when the same hardware could be had for $800 is not something that a child has the discretionary funding to do, it's the exact same people who buy mustangs with tinted windows even though they're slower than a honda civic
@@Cheesemonk3h To be fair, whenever anyone tries to get into building PCs and looks for help because they don't understand, all they get told by people with more experience is an entirely unhelpful explanation (by explaining it in terms only an experienced person would understand), or "what is there not to understand? It's so easy any idiot could do it," rather than people actually trying to help them understand. I have trouble blaming newbies for making seemingly obvious mistakes when those they look to for help make no effort whatsoever. I'd like to believe that this weren't the norm, but I've been working on computers for around 15 years, and maybe only seen one or two times where this wasn't the case with inexperienced people looking for help.
@@Cheesemonk3h I'm kinda a newb but I guess I fall in the middle, my first build was a 1060/ryzen 1300x, didn't care how it looked, didn't have even have a case window, now I'm building a new one based on a Gigabyte Vision 3060ti and yeah I do want it to be white and look cool, but I also was pretty bummed coming back to the PC parts market to see it saturated with "graffiti boards" and I was wondering why no boards had debug LEDs because that's a key feature for me and welp, now I know why. Like yeah I want an NZXT N7, but for $300? paying for aesthetic. Everything else in white wasn't much of a mark up.
Steve's rants are the best! So well-justified and objectively true, they highlight in humorous fashion the sad state of industry trends. These are not only entertaining but also informative, don't feel bad for doing these every once in a while 😄
The coveted rare source for 7 segment debug LEDs is the 3-tailed Jabberwocky Hootinanny birds of outer southern lower Borneo. These are the only birds that lay eggs containing these rare 7 segment LEDs. Unfortunately, there are only 2 birds of this species left.
Thanks for the great rant. This is what I went through on my last build - ending up with a bunch of LEDs I didn't want in order to get a feature / support that I did want. It works well, but I still feel semi-abused. Rant on, Steve!
Agreed. Thanks for making this. The problem is that manufacturers are marketing to kids that buy computers as fashion accessories. The RGB and excessive bling is embarrassing.
I actually had a 7-seg display on my last motherboard, which was super helpful. Was pissed when I couldn’t find a new 790 board with it under $500, glad I’m not the only one who noticed.
I found this exact issue that you are having to be incredibly frustrating for myself. I personally prefer having the 7 segment display to enable debugging. Makes trouble shooting WAY easier. Went to go build a system in 2022 and was completely blown away that everything that had it was super expensive.
I'm glad you made a video about this. I was recently helping a friend troubleshoot his new DDR5 build and was surprised his $300 motherboard did not come with a debug display. It made the entire process way more annoying than it needed to be. Locking debug features, especially such an inexpensive one, behind a paywall is unacceptable.
This is what exactly what I thought when I started upgarding my computer last year. It's so insane to have a mid/high tier mobo to have barely basic functioning.
yeah same, i build my pc like 1-2 years ago with a Z690 Tomahawk i was shocked that even with very much discount i payed fckn 220€ (at that time normally 300) for that board atm where are basically no features for anything that piece of crap doesnt have any usefull feature youll get some IO and 4 M.2 slots thats it
Been researching for good motherboard to replace my 9 year old 4th Gen Intel rig. Was so surprised that the debug function was only available on expensive motherboards. And not even not all expensive motherboard had that feature which also include onboard power and reset button. My Z97 Asrock Mobo have this function and it helps alot when doing troubleshooting especially doing overclock. Hope those manufacturer bring back these features on middle budget motherboards as well.
To me it's all not worth it. I'd just buy a sub 100 dollar board and just not bother overclocking. Also take a look at the QVL to see which RAM actually runs at XMP.
This is the perfect video. I could not agree more Steve. Motherboards of this generation are absolutely insane and manufacturers have lost their minds. I honestly believe that overpriced skus need to be purposely left on the shelf by us they can learn a hard lesson in appropriately valuing and serving their customers. It’s just wild to think that even just a couple years ago top shelf SKUs we’re all less than $400 to $500, whereas useful “all you need” SKUs were around $200. A perfect example is the Asus Crosshair boards. The X370 Crosshair VI Hero for Zen 1 was $289 at Microcenter. Today’s Asus X670 Crosshair Hero for Zen 4 is $700! Worse yet that’s reflective of basically the whole market! More than doubling the price in 4 to 5 years?! It’s criminal! Manufacturers are using the fallout from the coof as an excuse to get away with murder.
I'm absolutely with Steve on this rant and it's needed! Really hope there will be more rants like this from enough corners to induce some form of rethinking by manufacturers. Planing a build right now to replace my 8 1/2 year old rig with shifting focus and the search for the right Mobo has driven me nuts so far with pricing for basic features I want like the debug display. Finally (hopefully - maybe - I think) settled on the MSI Z790 Carbon. Still way too expensive but at least has the features I want (mostly, with a couple drawbacks). Used to have Asus but heard too much about problems with memory lanes on the new z790s there to deter me. And too much bling-bling.
This rant is perfectly valid, i had a dual Bios debug display board back in the DDR3 days and it cost me the equivilent of $150 brand new. Was excellent and helped me a lot as a novice
As someone who was out of the build market for the last few years, I saw new prices and did a spit take. Nice to see a breakdown of the insanity. Also "To that I say, 'YES'" and had to pause the video from the laughing. Brilliant. As usual Steve, keep up the great work.
Easy way to make this into its own playlist series and do one maybe once a month or so, so it doesn't get played out. We love you GN team thank you for all your work!
Debug readout is the number one thing I lookout for when getting a new motherboard. I was surprised back when I moved to 12th gen that it was somewhat similar in pricing that it was pretty price to get one from MSI or Asus with a debug readout. I got a Gigabyte motherboard which was one of the more affordable ones coming in under $300 for a Z690 with a debug readout.
Loved this rant. It's definitely hard to do stuff like this all the time, but next time you're feeling ranty I'd totally be down to watch a video on it again, this was pretty great. That camouflage bit, tho 💀
Thoughts on the older style of GN video?
Grab a GN 'Debug' Coaster Pack on the Store! Use code 'BUTWHY' for 10% off! store.gamersnexus.net/products/gn-drink-debug-coaster-pack-4-custom-3d-coasters-100x100mm-4x4 while code is active
Watch our latest news video to learn about motherboards with cables on the back: ruclips.net/video/tBxBUIoeNYo/видео.html
This is one of the funniest promotions for your products. Keep up the good work.
All of the GN team's vids are great lol.
Hi
Idk if Steve or someone else writes the jokes. But I find every single one of them perfection! My origin story one had me laughing like a lunatic
It's great. Everyone loves rants and more unhinged the better
Unhinged Steve is something we lack and something we need more of
Agree!
Absolutely
hinges are an unnecessary feature
I need the armory crate rant
I'd love to see it as it's own monthly series.
Motherboard pricing is absolutely insane. Thanks Steve for trying to bring features to lower tier motherboards
2018 I got my Asus Crosshair VII (x470) for 250€. The AM5 X670 Crosshair costs now 750€! Triple the price in 4 years is insane! Also, JayzTwoCents mentioned that they aren't even well made and keep dying, so I'll be skipping Asus motherboards for now.
Motherboard.. Graphics card.. Memory... CPU's... Pricing on PC parts in general is abit insane.
@@lyianx Memory and CPUs are actually reasonably priced,ddr4 is dirt cheap ddr5 is 130$ for 32GB so not bad either,you can get away with 150-300$ CPUs everything beyond sees minimal gains.
Motherboard pricing really has gone absolutely insane, boards should not have doubled, tripled or even more in less than 3yrs to 5yrs, I'm running an Asus X570 Formula as I loved the built in screen and overall look of the board but unfortunately has a water block that I have no need for, still cools amazingly well passively through. But if I want the X670e Hero, so a board with no waterblock I have to pay significantly more, I mean what in the actual hell!
Sad thing is that pc building isn’t even my most expensive hobby
The debug LED is treated as a premium option. They used to be on every cheap ass motherboard back in the day. The freaking things only cost pennies to add to a motherboard.
Probably removed to allow for more space for 50 RGB headers.
@@Aggnog Its removed so ppl who REALLY want it buy more expensive MBs.
@@Aggnog (But i am not 100% dislike your Idea either)
Used to be you could use a debug card but they took that away too.
(edit - could they develop a standard to use the 'bios flashback' port for debug code echo? it is clearly initialised before boot)
This. There's no excuse for MOBO's these days to NOT have at least a debug LED readout, with basic error indicators to give you an idea of where to start troubleshooting, which is still not as ideal as a code readout, which gives particular's about your issue.
Two points: 1) debugging features probably reduce RMAs and save money 2) Ask the engineers to code errors into the RGB LEDs that are on the board for aesthetics. If you have 8 RGB LEDS and you just stick to just off, red, green, and blue, you can encode 4^8 states, and you have your (somewhat inconvenient) error code readout.
You still have to worry about not explaining it in the manual, though. They've been doing it with beep codes for quite some time now, much to my frustration.
I like it.
My motherboard is somewhat like that. Its not RGB but there is a labelled LED on each section of the board. During POST they are all on, and turn off as each part passes the test. Whatever stays lit is what is preventing your boot up.
Guess im staying away from Asus...
@@freedustinhe covers that in the video. They're better than nothing but only point you to "RAM" or "CPU" not exactly what the RAM or CPU is failing at.
"For those who dare"
"game first, work later"
I swear those phrases are the equivalent of "live, love, laugh" for gamers
Yup, so cringe.
I always laugh when I see them.
Indeed
"game first, work later" = Why make good MB when can play games
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
...
"Don't throw stones in a glass house."
"The future is now."
"Power to the players." Oh, wait. That was Gamestop.
As a gamer and general PC user, I for one am happy we have GN to act as a voice for the majority of us. This 'rant' was really just 24 minutes of good old fashioned common sense. Thanks Steve.. please keep doing what you guys do, we all benefit from it.
Please dear God more of this. This has been one of my favorite GN videos to date. Steve roasting products and manufacturers is always my favorite thing.
I'm still recovering from when Steve said Thermaltake pulled air from the 4th dimension using a time cube alongside a tesseract. 😂
I loved that line. I remember it so well, because I spit out a bunch of water I was drinking when Steve said it.
...Shout out to Corsair for making the K70 keyboard not mind a little water. :D
Thanks for this video! 6 years ago I built a computer using an Asus ROG Hero board that I got for $215. This year as I was building my new computer I was so confused why the same product line, the hero boards, were $600. I still can't for the life of me figure out what makes it a $600 board. Bought an ROG strix board instead that had all the same features for $250. Board manufacturers have lost their minds.
Are you sure it wasn't a rogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrogrog?
I am in a very similar situation. I bought the crosshair hero 6 and loved that board. 7 segment saved my ass multiple times and the army of USB ports became something I relied on. Just recently went to upgrade the CPU and board and found to get those features were just stupid money. Several hundreds of dollars just wasn't worth it.
@@PigeonDetective yeah that's the one thing I wish my new board had is the 7 segment display. Now it only has the 4 color LEDs. I get nervous when it sits on the ram LED because I have no idea if it is training the memory or if I broke something!
Why wouldn't you have just gone with a different brand at that point? You still gave them your money after seeing they are willing to markup a board by $400 for literally nothing. I spent $150 on a Gigabyte Aorus Elite board that is 99% the same as the $250 Strix. Steve didn't even mention how Asus is becoming junk with their new boards being some of the most unreliable out of all the brands' offerings. I saw for the first time this year people using the phrase "don't get an Asus" when making motherboard recommendations, _that's_ how you know times have changed.
Its probably because rog rog rog rog rog rog rog rog rog rog rog rog
I remember 200 dollar boards being the top of the line for a long time. Now 200 bucks is not even the basic features 😅
Yeah when I went to put together my new rig late last year I was like, what the hell? Why are these all $300+ lol
The amount of fleecing motherboard manufacturers do now over features that were ubiquitous in the mid range from 2005-2015 is disgusting. I remember in 2010; you could buy an Asrock X58 Extreme 3 with the brand new USB and Sata 3, a beefy vrm, a above average onboard audio, and more pcie lanes and usb ports than you could shake a stick at for $125usb when it was new. That was consider a value highend board, and it was not unique back then.
@@anasevi9456 at the rate things are going I'm expecting "dual channel memory" to become a premium feature. Only available on board 400 USD and up 😀
imagine a 200 dollar board and you dont event get a CPU and ATX power sockets on the motherboard
@@SyntheticFuture don't give em ideas, jeez!
Love how it was the engineers who told him "not our call, make noise so we can tell them to change things", just shows that engineers are real people while marketing and execs are not.
Bean counters care about min-maxing profits, engineers care about making a good product that meets the specifications. (Including the specifications set but the bean counters.)
@@Fractal_32 I just bought a bunch of stuff in the last couple of weeks. The guys who met my specs "min-maxxed" their profits on those transactions. The jackasses who were too busy painting things pretty colors to make a product that actually does it's fucking job, did not.
The problem is not bean-counters. The problem is idiots and assholes, some of whom might coincidentally happen to be the same people who are also the bean-counters.
These companies don't have engineers anymore. They have toddler brain scammers who steal things then cobble together something and call it a day. And it all shows that from the websites up to actual devices in majority all being created and operated by braindead people, while the end consumer in places like US is the worst and buys any trash there is, even people who starve they are hooked on these garbage devices. Chain reaction that created a new market that sells garbage.
so if they're not real people what are they?
to play devils advocate the measure for success in their respective jobs are very different.
the engineer doesn't need to give a frak about profitability. he won't lose his job or bonus if that sector is lacking.
trust me if an x570 tomahawk "elite" came out at 280$-299$ with a debug code LED they would have sold like hotcakes. The engineers knew this....and would have enjoyed such concepts playing out in the market/for their respective companies....yet theres a WIDE gap/margin between the ideal vrm/temp operating boards w.o debug LED...and and the would be "FLAGSHIPS"
“Let’s make people as financially uncomfortable as possible while building a computer” Couldn’t be more true.
Then they are wondering why the PC market is struggling
It feels so bad. I was in the market for some forced upgrades last December (my GPU died) and no matter how I looked at it I felt robbed. And I know this video is about computers, but I can't help but feel the same way in other aspects of my life currently, from grocery shopping, to housing, to PCs. I wonder if past generations felt like this on a daily basis as well...
this is fine. poor people buy consoles
@@jersak22 Indeed, I had to buy the CPU and Motherboard on monthly payments just to afford it and at least get some discounts during black friday sale. Ended up getting a X670E crosshair hero as 1)at the time no motherboard that has a decent amount of m.2 slots had two v3.x internal usb headers for the front i/o on the H500M. 2)Didn't have lame ass PCI-E 5.0 bifurication where M.2 slots would take lanes from the x16 slot. Also have the debug features that I needed give AM5 is radically different compared to AM4 and boy did I need those debug features. There were countless times i thought the motherboard had died on me but it turned it was going through ridiculously long boot check and restore process / memory training. There were also times when I went abit too aggressive on the undervolt although it would warm boot fine. But on the second cold shut down it would literally fall into a coma. Only clearing the CMOS several times via the jumper would bring it back. Later bios updates have solved most of the issues but there is one issue still not resolved - the AMD overclocking menu does nothing, all settings have to be set under the extreme tweaker menu.
@@jersak22 It might've been this bad in the early 90s for just computers, but the last time it was this bad just generally was shorly before The Great Depression. If things keep going this way, we might just see an economic collapse.
I’ve been saying this for a while. A easy debug display make troubleshooting so much easier and the cost to the manufacturer is negligible. It should be a standard feature on all consumer boards above $150, which is basically all motherboards now.
yeh it's insane that most am5 mobo at 250 to 350 don't have the debug error code screens on them.. for example the am5 asus strix gaming f mobo costs around 450 in the UK, and dose not have the debug error code screen, where as the strix gaming f board from the pervious generation the x570 gaming f mobo had this feature while being £150 cheaper. it's a joke that to get this feature on these newer boards you need to spend 450 plus which is a joke.
This is spot on. The motherboards today need to get back to having useful features instead of fancy screens no one really cares about
Yeah, these new boards all look like they're designed for children on Christmas morning. All dressed up like new transformer toy.
But how can you be cool without RGP lights and "Gamers first".
You want to be cool right, right?
ROG, ROG, ROG, ROG, ROG, ROG.
Glad to see someone speak up on this. Recently I was shocked to discover that the closest thing to a debug 7 segment display on a final-generation SP3 board I was troubleshooting was an arrangement of 8 red/green LEDs that spelled out in binary the last 2 hex digits of the POSTcode. Surely server motherboard manufacturers can afford to do better than that.
The next model will print out out debug codes as punched paper.
Was on call with a server manufacturer because their insanely overpriced shit box was DOA.
I have a box from 2008 with a pop-out LED-board that tells you what is wrong with red and green lights. 2022 brand new piece of kit, single green LED. I pray they do not find out RJ45 jacks without LEDs are 4ct cheaper!
At least you have o code to work with.. The EZ debug LED makes the process just frustrating. Four LED's which tell you where the problem could be, never noticed a flash code on those things...
This comment is the key part of the rant that I feel Steve missed: 8 LEDs would do the same thing as two 7-segment displays and they could put the decode information in the manual (since they're going to ship it with one) and resolves two engineer's complaints: the 7-segment can still be premium and the identical LEDs would have bulk purchase price reduction.
Omg finally someone adressing this issue, it somehow always got worse and worse for no reason whatsoever. A few years ago at least most mid to higher end mobo had these debug displays
it's because of jews and freemasons creating problems to distract people away from real problems. they also have a quota of suffering they need to put into the world to keep people irritated and as slaves. irritated people are easier to control also
I hadn't even noticed the trend until I built my second pc like five years later. First motherboard was like $100 and had the LED debug tool. Really useful feature. New PC the motherboard cost me almost $200 and didn't have an LED readout. It just had the traffic lights, which has solved literally zero problems for me so far. Woulda been real nice when the damn thing was boot-looping on me.
I am very glad you tackle and publicize these seemingly minor issues. It's a creeping complacency in the consumers of this industry that must be stopped. We must stand our ground and demand our products do not diminish in quality over time. We do not want to end up like the lightbulb business.
itd just hurt them to cherry pick like this, because even ppl with the money are just gonna avoid them because they cant grasp or have no use for a feature packed board.
Wait until seven segment goes to a subscription based model. That rant will be gold.
Uh oh! Your computer doesn't seem to be turning on. Would you like to know why?
- Yes
Please insert method of payment
@@GamersNexus dell would bring this to the table, count on that
option in the configurator:
debug option
yes (*)
no ( )
upgrade cost: 20 $
20 if it is on sale ofc, 50 $ if not
@@scudsturm1 LOL no way Dell would be that basic - they would direct you to an operator to sell you the debug code, an upgrade to what the f it actually means, and an upsell to Dell ProSupport Plus (TM) subscription since you have your card out anyway.
Don't give them ideas!
@@GamersNexus YAMETEEEEEEE
I can't agree more.
I got a Gigabyte z690 last year at 260€ with a 7-segment display.
Just for the lols I searched online, and NO z790 today has the 7-segment, except a 600€ motherboard.
This is absolutely insane!
Even better is when the low end mobos instead put a "ez debug led" on it, and all it tells you is "something went wrong with your cpu good luck figuring it out lol"
Pretty sure a Q-Code 7 segment display would not be more expensive, in fact, the logic already has to be there, it needs to either set a "cpu error" flag when a specific thing goes wrong, or straight up compares a return code and gives out a signal to an LED depending on that... Just hook that code up to a 7-segment display instead...
My Gigabyte Z790 Gaming X AX doesn't have one 😅
Yeah true, @Nicnl my first build has an AX370 Gaming 5 mobo, with a 7 segment debug in situ! That board was around $160ish! Then I get a replacement board this year for $170+ (a superb deal tho) X570 Steel Legend WiFi AX and it has no debug codes and highly doubt LEDs!! 😢😢😢
We certainly need to rant MORE!!! Steve I 100% back your rant! Let's rage against this Co.s that are making silly marketing/sales decisions! What a $1½ rip-off.... *ahem SCAM!
i have a maximus vii hero from 2013 it has seven segment display
@@tacokoneko Same!! I recently just built my Plex server with it. I love that board and I'm so glad I got to reuse it.
In fact, I've already used the debug display 3 times now since rebuilding it. Twice while building it and once while I was out of town the wife said Plex was down, so she read me the code and I walked her through what to do 🙃
“Sales usually wins.” As an engineer, I felt that in my soul.
A functioning and dependable infrastructure doesn't make money.
When corporate chooses short term stupidity over the higher end option that will pay off over 3 times its value in its lifespan over the "cheap" option.
Long term development isn't anywhere near as valuable as short term quarterly gains.
Remember these people make more money than you.
Yea… all about them short term gains. As an operations pm they’re one of the worst business partners.
In The Lost Interview that's the reason Jobs said that Xerox failed. They had it all, but reached a saturation point where engineers were pushed out of the decision making forums due to salespeople being the ones who could increase profits at that stage. Leading to a slow decline in quality and dominance.
I think anyone with qualifications in a field that deals with sales people feels that 😂
Every. Freaking. Time. Bane of my existence as a software engineer.
Thanks for this. I followed because I wanted to get a PC but didn't know anything about brands, components, etc. I also had the impression that more expensive meant more better. Videos like these are a great help to the ignorant like myself. I greatly appreciate it.
This is why I originally subscribed to GN all those years ago, Steve calling a spade for what it is with this his passion is genuinely inspiring!
Same
1:17 Gotta love the engineers, I feel their pain. They want to do right by the customers they make boards for, but marketing and other teams get in their way. Thank you GN for standing with the engineers on this one.
Engineers are probably members of PCMR and builders themselves. Sales and marketing probably duh, maybe just buy Mac Airbooks.
@@keithw4920 "members of PCMR" yeah, no. Doubt those engineers are as childish as the average PCMR member. You should instead say they are PC enthusiasts.
@@keithw4920 Or just the latest Apple or Samsung flagship phone.
I heard a quote from boat reviewer "you'll never find an engineer who is ok cutting corners." Engineers, generally speaking, are the most passionate people in their fields, but as in the rest of life, money beats intelligence.
People hold engineers in too high regard. They are just people and aren’t the heroes you think they are.
We needed someone to say that in a plain and direct way.
Thanks Steve & GN Team for always standing up for the consumer.
Literally a couple months later ASRock came out with $350 Taichi lite boards with 7 segs on em. I got $20 says this video had at least something to do with it.
Thank you for making this video. I went through this struggle a couple years ago trying to find a decent motherboard with a 7 segment display. I ended up sacrificing and got an MSI board that had 3 led debug lights. It was so frustrating to troubleshoot when the time came, I'll never do that again. I really hope manufactures listen to this video.
In theory, I don't have a problem with the LED debug lights. I mean, when it comes right down to it, it's just a visual version of the debug beeps of old and those were basically the same limited variables of CPU, RAM, GPU etc. So I applauded MSI for at least trying to bring back those indicators in some form back when they standardized debug LEDs on their boards. My only problem with them was they were absolutely tiny and scrunched together in use. And the LED was so bright, it was often hard to tell which light was actually on. Especially from a distance, or poor eyesight, or without a flashlight to drown out the LED. If MSI had at least color coded the debug LEDs, it would've been far easier to use in practice.
Yes, I agree a 7 segment display is the ideal means of debugging system issues, but I'd still much rather have the debug LEDs than nothing at all. I was livid when board manufacturers got rid of debug speakers without providing anything to replace it across all boards (debug codes still only being on high end boards) years ago back when UEFI first started rolling out. So I still want to see debug LEDs at the very least on all boards that don't have 7 segment displays. But I also think 7 segment displays should be automatically included on any motherboard over $200-$250. I don't care what the "relative" market considers high end these days. I still consider any motherboard over $200 expensive and I don't see any excuse for an expensive motherboard not to provide debug codes.
He talks about "back in his day", that was my day too (I've been building computers for over 20 years) and I still can't believe how expensive motherboards have become. It wasn't that long ago that you could get a high end motherboard for $160-$180. My last motherboard cost me $340 and I thought that was insane. The most I'd ever spent on a motherboard by far. My next motherboard is going to cost me $600 for the functional spec I'm looking for. I still can't believe I'm actually going to pay that, but I just don't see a better option in the cheaper price brackets that meets my requirements. I used to tell people they should never pay more for their motherboard than they do for their CPU. But these days, that's all I see. Most motherboards these days have all become obscenely more expensive than the CPUs they support and I still think there's something wrong with that trend.
I'm in the market to upgrade, i want a R7 7800X3D (just waiting for benchmarks but the decision is pretty much made at this point... this or wait until next lineup refresh),
i was already scouting for Motherboards. It is ridiculous.
I have like 4 simple requirements.
- optical port for 5.1 surround system (has gotten super rare! what the hell? do you think i buy a new 5.1 Surround System because you decide to change plugs? this is no more headphone jack on phones all over again)
- debug LEDs (the simple ones, the segmented ones are priced out of my range already... wtf?)
- 4+ SATA ports for my SSDs.
- 2-3 PCI-E Slots more than just the GPU. (one of them for a soundcard because you don't have optical port anymore, i guess)
- it would be nice if it was black and had some CLASSY none-cringe RGB (like, no ebay car tuning dragons 'n shit please).
aaaand with just that i'm already down to like 3 - 5 boards in the entire AM5 range of boards.
but hey... at least i get FIVE M.2 ports for my ONE M.2 Drive on almost all boards.
I'm all decked out now in SATA drives, by the time i got 5 M.2 drives they probably will replace it with an M.3 port and declare this stuff obsolete again.
@@ZeroB4NG I was pretty much the same. I also need a toslink for my speakers. I actually needed 6 SATA ports until a couple of my drives died last month and ultimately decided if I have to buy new drives anyway, I might as well transition them to m.2. But there are enough features on the Asus X670E Hero (such as 2 USB4 ports) that I ultimately decided to stick with that board (for now, I'm still open to considering new options if they appear on the market before I'm ready to buy). I ultimately chose to get a motherboard that had a good sound card on it that included toslink because a lot of boards, as soon as you install a card on one of the other PCIE slots, they cut your PCIE x16 slot lanes to 8x and I wanted to avoid that if possible. If there was no way around it, I would've been fine, but I wanted to avoid it if possible. I also picked the Hero because none of the m.2 slots shared PCIE lanes with the top x16 slot like some boards. So I can fill all 4 M.2 slots if I want to without having to worry about my x16 slot's lanes being halved.
As far as the RGB though... It doesn't really bother me. Mainly because you can change the colors to whatever you want, and even if you don't want them, they're really easy to turn off altogether (apart from maybe system boot). But beyond that, RGB I've always felt to be a non-issue, so I don't really make it a major factor in my buying decisions. The functions are far more important to me than the form. I'll still try to make it look good, but the function always has to take precedence for me.
@@ZeroB4NG things like the SATA ports are part of the southbridge so the lack of available ports are Intel's/AMD's doing. There are M.2 cards with SATA ports that use a JMicron chipset which work well and you can keep with the SATA drives. Those 5 M.2 ports filled with adapters would give you 20 HDD connections.
You can’t possibly hate this channel that speaks undeniable facts. Truth to everything. Thank you Steve and Gamers Nexus crew. Much appreciated.
Debug LEDs used to be so common that I took them for granted. I've been building for a long time and it feels like the end of an era when something so useful is often absent.
Yeah, I haven't bought a motherboard in years and it's disheartening to hear that the debug led's are pretty much gone.
@@volvo09 They aren't completely gone, the Aorus B650m motherboard has debug LED's while only being 185 dollars. Those debug LED's saved my ass the first time it was booting up. Since it takes forever for cheap AM5 motherboards with high ram to boot up for the first time.
If it wasn't for the presence of the LED's then I would have tottaly thought it was dead, and either RMA'd it or just eaten the cost. But the presence of the debug LED's helped to convince me that the board wasn't dead. And was just taking a while to boot in. So I went to the grocery store, put away the grocies, then went to the bathroom. And then . . . it was finally done booting up for the first time.
And after that first AM5 long boot the board has worked like a dream. Long AM5 boot up times on cheap boards with high ram counts does suck. But debug LED's are a blessing.
Yup. Couldn't agree more.
@@CharlieConcepts-pw9ur Haha, this happened to me last night.
my asus rog strix z690-A has the LED's but also at a 350 euro pricepoint you'd figure at that kind of money for a mobo you'd get a dr debug with it : /
Thanks Steve. Basically someone needed to say this out loud. Corporations like these will literally snag up any little excuse for keeping prices high. One day very soon no one will be able for afford anything...how will that help their margins when that happens.
The current crop of C suite people don't care, because they'll bail with their golden parachutes.
Bold of you to assume that most of humanity even thinks about the next week.
All praise the corporatocracy.
they'll just keep cutting til there's nobody left but the ceo, who's currently skipping to the bank with enough money to start another company
Unchecked Capitalism at its finest. Don't worry though, most Americans thinks it's someone's human right to be able to do this to people.
Thanks Steve.
The industry absolutely needs to hear all of this.
Its time for them to shape up
I would like to add that one other thing motherboard makers are slowly omitting is the block diagram or system architecture diagram. These can be helpful in troubleshooting PCIe issues especially when those PCI lanes are shared. Look at Asrock-they are only having these in their higher end boards. Gigabyte is a bit random as even some of their enthusiast Aorus range don;t have these block diagrams.
I fully support what you're saying. We used to have POST code displays in 775 days on most enthusiast boards, and for top tier (I think it was P5E3 Premium or P5E64 WS Evo) ASUS even had a separate dongle with power/reset buttons and debug code you could plug into the board. The debug displays were common till Haswell era, but that's when RGB madness started.
Out of other useful features that boards used to have that were completely abandoned (or pushed into extreme segment), because they're not sexy:
- power/reset buttons, great stuff for quickly testing without a case
- proper dual BIOS, not like things Gigabyte did when you had 2 chips on the PCB but it switched randomly, or the stuff from Asus where a part of code is shared between both bioses and when you change major ME version on one IOS, the other stops working
- saving BIOS profiles to USB
- enhanced diagnostics such as embedded MemTest
Yes, you're passionate about it, but you're also RIGHT. I spent three days chasing down a fault, replacing the CPU and motherboard TWICE only to find out it was a PCI-E to SATA add-in card that was causing a failure to POST. The only reason I found out was that I replaced the cheap motherboard I was using with a more expensive one that had a segmented POST code display. So now I have two motherboards that are 100% okay that I can't use for the moment.
dude what? if a board isnt posting, the first thing u do is unplug anything not needed to post.
@@bookshelffury Of course you bring it down to minimum config. I introduced parts piece by piece, and it passed POST every time. Then it'd just randomly fail after everything was back in, forcing me to start over. It's not always clear cut, and the part isn't always bad all the time. With a debug display, I at least knew where to start looking when it failed POST.
Agree completely here, motherboard manufacturers keep removing actual useful features and adding on stupid tacky ones to jack up the prices to absurd levels. I'd greatly appreciate the return to x58-x79 era boards.
Motherboard prices are getting more insane than GPU prices and the one thing i can't get is how can people buy them?
I mean is silly but i get why one is so obsessed with 4K-ray tracing in full detail at 120 fps that makes him want to throw like 1500 for a GPU.
BUT A MOTHERBOARD? Really? Why? 500 and 1000 for a motherboard? It's so pointless.
I literally have a 60 buck motherboard in my system that went for 9 years and still going.
@@SIPEROTH thats the problem. you can make a 60 bucks motherboard that works on a basic level (especially with the efficient new cpus) and those dont make a lot of money. So Manufacturers try to upsell you to the highest price possible by removing basic features off a cheap mobo.
"Sure you can use this 100 buck mobo but you aint getting this fancy USBC connector or XMP or more than 2 USB 3.0 ports"
Thanks Steve for putting these issues out in the spotlight so that people can understand that they are getting less features for more money.
Also having useful description for debug codes !!
My old z77x-ud3h is looping 03-14 codes and:
03 - not in debug led codes table
14 - reserved
Now the AMD and NVIDIA shills need to understand this is the exact same crap those two are doing to the GPU market. Way more money for a bit better performance. line up boys!
"less features for more money" is pretty much the tech industry slogan.
Steve's amazing hair is turning grey. The industry is killing him :(
This. Every generation it seems like the midrange gets weaker and costs more.
Most people don't care about the debug LED until something breaks and then have to tear their hair out trying to look at blinking lights. When I last upgraded I only looked at a motherboard which had an led display for error codes. Things break over time and it's always useful to have to be able to easily see what the issue is.
The debug LED is SUPER SUPER useful when your system won't boot. Honestly IMO no motherboard over $100 should be without it. It's such a simple thing that is so useful. I wish someone made an add on debug LED or something like that. Not sure if that is possible though.
then buy a $10 POST diagnostic pci card that you put in the pc when it's not booting?
@@tomservo5007 The issue is that the ones I see online are PCI, not PCIE. And it seems that nobody's updated one to work with modern PCIE.
@@tomservo5007 Honestly didn't even know those existed until I read your comment.
Exactly. My ****ing raspberry pi picos have a debug LED on them. That's a 4-dollar-including-breakout-board microcontroller. I'm working on building a battery for my e-bike that will have a debug LED on its control circuitry (because it'll be pico-based). I can wire up a little blinky gag-gift circuit for one of my nieces, and it'll have a debug LED on it. Why is it more cost-effective for me to build an automatic sprinkler controller for my garden that has a debug LED, than it is to get the same feature when building my multi-thousand-dollar desktop workstation? A part that goes inside the tower case, behind my monitor, having a built-in programmable rainbow light-show that I have never and will never use is NOT more important than my computer being able to do computer-ey things like, ya know, booting up.
Same here! I diagnosed a dead CPU this way!
These videos are sometimes needed. A large channel speaking for themselves and the rest of the community voicing frustration.
T. sensor headers is another useful thing that has become rare to see on low to mid tier motherboards, not everyone needs them, but when you do they're really nice to have.
T sensor is an absolute must for me. I place a probe inside the GPU and set the chassis fans to monitor / react to that temperature.
Temp sensors are good for watercooling to control fan speeds based on water temp, is the best way to do it
Debug features would also be great for new builders. I’m fairly new and both builds I’ve done so far I had a booting issue. It took me hours to figure out what was wrong. I had no idea what I was doing wrong and it took many hours of research to fix my issues.
This video needs to be everywhere for everyone to see. the industry feels completely out of control with pricing and until people stop paying prices because "that's just what it costs" it may never stop.
The thing is people aren’t going to give up their hobby in protest, and we’re at the point now where you just can’t play new games without the upgrade. I think a lot of people have already held out against the urge to upgrade because of the pricing situation, and the longer you hold on the higher the prices get. Inflation is always a positive number, prices rarely fall or ‘go back down’.
Instead you wait a little longer than usual yet eventually cave, uncomfortably handing over more than you should as Steve mentions.
@@AUserName-fv8zjI mean, if you’re smart you can still have a relatively affordable experience - heavily discounted RDNA 2 cards have been genuinely good value ever since the GPU shortage ended.
Facts for the sales people: every time I've been presented with choosing between two similarly priced boards, and one of them had seven segment debug display, I've chosen that one. It's a really helpful feature when your system won't POST, which happens sometimes (sometimes during the build, but also it can spontaneously happen years after you've finished the build), it can happen, and it's a useful feature.
I just buy the board I want and use the $3 PCI-E LPC debug card.
@@fuzzybabyducks7878 I have one, but it's annoying to swap out. I'd rather just have the $0.25 led soldered there thanks.
Tbh with all the RGB leds these new bords have they can just use them as blink codes.
@@xfy123 Blink codes are rubbish, they're better than nothing but not good.
@@fuzzybabyducks7878 I have one of those, in some drawer somewhere where I won't find it when I need it. They could just build it right into the motherboard for essentially no extra cost.
I like the idea of having a separate header for a specific debug tool for the pros. I do feel there should be standards on every motherboard: cmos clear button, bios flashback, and standard single plug for the front panel
Yeah, that header is called "speaker".
Should be just a USB output that your phone can read through an app, and give you a telemetry output after which exact function the system freezed/stopped.
Btw a Raspberry pie is about 10-20 bucks and can give you full screen, having that instead of the shit Realtek audio that still makes bogus/unnecessary noise would make my day.
Audio DAC/splitter/preamp should anyway not be inside the computer case but better in the monitor or HDMI amplifier or other external audio device.
My 7 year old computer is dying and the old mobo seems to have more features that boards over 600 wtf
Wifi too should be default. Seriously, it's so much better to not have to fill a PCIE slot with a wifi card.
My motherboard have clearcmos pin header and it really usefull
My main gripe with motherboard manufacturers is that they now demand over $1000 for their flagship boards which probably only cost them maybe $200 more to make over their lower-tier boards. It's crazy that we now live in a time where the motherboards have become more expensive than the cost of the processor you're putting in the board. The messed up thing is that these companies will not provide any decent support, even if you do buy their higher-tier models.
capitalism am i right
@@nolo5220 More like robber baron capitalism
Easy solution: don't buy. There is nothing in these expensive motherboards that is worth the price tag. Overclocking is dead and extra connectivity is rarely worth it.
And long ago it had already bothered me that I cannot get a sane board with decent practical features like enogh I/O without all the stupid shit crammed into it, too.
Product segmentation is iconic capitalist scourge. It's basically 'feature hostage taking'.
My take is by how AMD am4 survived 5 gens the manufacturers want to their money upfront. Expecting the user to keep the same board for next 8 years or so
Seven-segment displays have helped me on every single build I've done in the last fifteen years. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that it's included on every mid-range-plus board.
especially when taking into account that when applied at a large enough scale, the actual cost of it should be roughly equal to including the little error-code-beeper thingamajig.
Edit: effing hell, only now reached the part of the video where i hear that apparently even those aren't included anymore? Which case has them mounted in there nowadays? compared to about 5yrs ago where every case still had one integrated and they STILL supplied an auxiliary one with the mobo... what the actual heck.
So many RAM and boot issues so quickly found. I used to just know the hex code it would pause at so I could address things.
honestly it's about time someone spoke out about this and it makes me happy that you did. 7seg debug displays are by far the most useful things I've seen on a board to troubleshoot problems and it honestly makes me miss my old Phenom II rig with an MSI 890FXA-GD70 motherboard. that board had the debug display and a freaking dial to OC. sadly after many years it succumbed to that motherboard's one problem, the FF-d1 error loop and barely boots anymore. but besides all of this you barely see debug displays anymore and i was surprised they were still a thing. that pricing is absolutely ridiculous though and i hope companies start to add this feature to more boards after hearing what you have to say.
It is insane, my 939 abit board had the 7segment, sli, a freaking frontal panel for info, oc and other shit with a built screen, more cables and shit that I needed, PLUS a pc internal speaker and it didnt cost more than midrange cpu’s. Nowadays I have to keep recycling that old ass pc internal speaker each time I change the motherboard.
I work in IT. I've been thinking about these same things and thought maybe it's just me being grumpy and having a larger than average sample size to see issues with. That being said, it's nice to hear others feel the same about current motherboard trends. Great video as always.
If even one mobo manufacturer would commit themselves to being enthusiast friendly and really supporting these small but meaningful QOL features at a reasonable price point they would have my loyalty for a LONG time and they'd definitely be my go-to for any builds for friends and family because then I can actually help them when something goes wrong without it being a giant pain in the arse.
I love it when Steve goes on a rant, the entertainment and popcorn value is amazing. It also doesn't hurt that he's normally right! :)
its nice that were all being entertained and nobodys getting mad, being entertained really helps us with staying focused and making ourselves being heard
normally? Don't remember Steve ever being wrong when he's ranting ...
More of this please. I love the direction the channel has taken however there is plenty of room for content like this still, it’s sorely needed. Back to you Steve.
I noticed this as well when I built my current rig in 2020. The $300 motherboard that I ended up purchasing couldn’t support the 4x8GB config of 3600CL18 RAM that I purchased to go with it. To add to Steve’s frustration, a lot of entry level motherboards don’t even include a speaker for beep codes anymore. It’s honestly insane. There is virtually no way to perform any sort of informed debugging/troubleshooting anything in the entry level.
Edit: And Steve just covered it. I’m glad I’m not the only person who is equally frustrated with motherboards right now.
What was the motherboard?
Some have lights, like b450 tomahawk
Just love such debug codes ... but way more important is to write down what that darn code is.
I'm just now struggling with a TRX40 motherboard and the C5 memory error (at least the Asus motherboard shows a memory logo next to it) - but ... wherever I look there's no explanation to that code...
thats why i ended up buying a pcie post code board for like $4 from china, fkin hell without post code/beeps, how do i even start?
@@VenaNocta It's a memory training code. I assume you're using the Zenith II, that and Threadripper in general is notoriously finicky for the CPU being seated properly. I would clean the underside of the CPU, make sure the socket isn't damaged at all, and try each memory channel one by one making sure the RAM and slot are clean and seating the module several times to make sure there is good contact. I've had that error on several ASUS TRX40 boards and it always ended up working eventually.
"great design - can't wait to never see it" lmao
Finally, someone talk about this, it makes me plain mad at this point and make my professional AND personal life more difficult for no reason. The MB that include useless features but not a freaking debug function seems to be unavoidable this days if I want a normal price. Thank you GN for doing this.
I also miss dual bios options, would've been nice so you could support more Ryzen chips for example on the same board, rather than eventually updating to the point where some would lose support. For a more practical reason, it's good in case you mess up a BIOS update and need a backup.
Had to JTAG a few boards or just use USB chip burners to recover a bad flash.
@@prawny12009also JTAG was the old apple pre T2 security chip wasn't it? The one that would randomly crap or lock out all the time 😂
i also like it bc covid work from home etc....ppl could have a config for work that is legit/boots etc....well tuned....and a OC bois bsod etc....ram tuned to the limit setup...for "GAMING" when those sessions AAA sessions or benchmark score climbing boot sessions are going to be what that system is going to encounter....and if you have stability issues with the tune bc said end user is trying max out their AAA experience on 4k or QHDUW, or a maxed out timing tune for fabric. If theres ever any windows/power profile etc updates that could lead to stability issues with the OC profile/system...you can just flip to bios B/vanilla to handle some work if/when needed as a mandatory priority....then flip back to A to re-configure the OC for a new bios update, or new windows update that subsequently leads to stability issues with a pre-determined OC of prior.
Gigabyte still has them on ultra durable motherboards.
Well you don't need dual bios to support more Ryzen chips. The issue with last generation is that manufacturers wanted to save a quater of a cent and went with 16 mb BIOS rom chips. And that they build the most messed up UEFI with like "gamer" pngs for everything.
holy crap thank you so much for this video. I have been looking for am5 motherboards and thought I was going crazy seeing so many basic features missing from even $400 motherboards, its genuinely getting rediculous. we definitely need more unhinged steve.
Same! I am in the middle of a build right now and wanted to enjoy 10gb Ethernet and at least 1 5.0 pcie slot for when I can get my hands on a new 5.0 m.2 SSD - couldn’t find a board under 500 that had these features!
Thing is for gaming, unless your getting a 4080 or higher then a 5800x3d is going to max your graphics card
ROG seem to be pretty well balanced for value with its motherboards. When choosing my new AM5 ATX mobo, I had 2 ROG mobos out of 4 options, the only other better mobo that wasnt ROG was priced out because it simply too expensive for what it was offering. There were better EATX mobos but they were too big and far above price range. Its mental how expensive some mobos are now, and what they lack. Oh and shit dont get me started on lack of connections or pcie slots RIP
Just skip AM5, there's absolutely nothing on the market worth buying into the BS on display by all the manufacturers trying to squeeze every single dollar out. They need to learn a lesson.
If you must buy AM5, The B650E Tai chi, and live mixer boards strike a very good balance between functionality and cost.
@@RobertSmith-lh6hg well said - if the engineers are getting rekt and sales matter more… then us not buying it HOPEFULLY will send the message🫡
It's comforting knowing that whenever Steve gets unhinged it's usually because consumers are getting absolutely screwed. Thank you Steve.
I appreciate this.
Finding a MoBo that had reasonable features for under $200 was such a pain when I recently helped a friend piece together a build with a $1k budget.
In 2023, I feel there is no excuse for the mid-range mobos to exclude features like debug codes and on-board reset switches. Perhaps even dual BIOS and BIOS flashback for when things go wrong.
It would kinda be like buying a 2023 car that didn't have power windows.
@@sirsneakybeaky I totally get that. If omitting these features nets me up to a $60 discount on a mid-ranger, then yes it makes a lot of sense to omit them. Personally, I'm not convinced that the savings would be a significant portion of the overall board cost. I could certainly be wrong though.
My buddy may not use those features, but if I was going to be the one to troubleshoot, I would like those nice-to-haves assuming it doesn't add a significant amount to the overall board cost. To me it seems like these troubleshooting features have been around long enough to have trickled down to the entry level considering some high-end components now have full-on color displays on them.
funny you should say that, because a similar thing happened to Kia and Hyundai recently, and it led to them being utterly humiliated for it. a Tik Tok video came out, showing that if you could open up the steering cover of a base model Kia or Hyundai, the ignition switch could fit inside a USB Type A male port (literally the one on every USB cable). With it, you could turn on the ignition and start the car and steal it. This being Tik Tok, the video went viral and stealing Kias became a challenge. It caused car theft in the US to basically double. Stealing Kias and Hyundais with a usb cable was so easy that not one, but TWO 11 year old children did it. Kias and Hyundais were so easy to steal LITERAL CHILDREN did it. It was a colossal embarrassment.
the best part, and the reason why they deserved to be humiliated for this? The vulnerability could have been easily prevented by adding a super cheap security device in their cars. I think the part cost like $40. Basically peanuts for a car. Using this device is so obvious that in countries like Canada, its use in all new cars is mandated by law. In the US, purely for market segmentation, Kia and Hyundai decided to only put it in their higher end models and make it a premium feature
@@sirsneakybeaky But that debug will help you when they do bring it to you.
Funny you said that, the power window thing.
Car manufacture literally software lock feature on car, and sell them back to customer with monthly subscription for years.
why not just buy a $10 POST diagnostic pci card?
I was way out of the PC loop when I built a new one in 2021 and I was quite surprised to see that debug lights were only on high end motherboards. I was so genuinely confused and seeing this reminded me of that whole debacle.
Finally! I'm no longer the only person complaining about this! I started publishing articles about this a year ago, and not a soul listened to me.
20:45, That's actually a phenomenal idea. That way, instead of racing to remove all the PCIe lanes, they can actually leave them on the board and just make a clever attachment for the other things we'll want. I would love to have a POST display. RGB boards won't make or break me, but I'll admit that they're nice. Maybe without so much hogging space on the board, they can add more M.2 slots without depriving us of PCIe lanes when said slots are used [looking at *YOU,* MSI 😡], or limiting how many SATA SSD's we can add. Internal soundcards are coming back, soooooooooo - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Also, WiFi for PC gaming is catching on, so - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Interest in mGPU on the AMD side is coming back, soooo - yeah, more PCIe lanes would be good. Some people are using PCIe for fast storage [NVME] expansions, so - yeah, more lanes would be good. I'm so sick of these corporations making things worse, charging more for them, and saying it's because they're better when they're actually not as useful. Motherboard manufacturers are why I refuse to upgrade to current gen. I'd much rather get more powerful components from last gen if I need an upgrade, and reserve the rest for simply upgrading my GPU's.
Ahhh... the golden age of the late 90s and early 2000s when computers got better and cheaper at the same time.
was still good up until 2015...........since then it looks like all down hill BS with GREEDY costs.
They can FOOK tehmselves these days...............
that really didn't stop till about 2016 into 2017, when we hit our first Crypto Push that caused PC parts to skyrocket, till then we mostly were getting better and cheaper every year up till then. It's been up and down since.
the problem is 2000s computer was dogshit in 2004 already, it was moving too fast.
and nowadays you could argue that something like 2600k, a ~12 years old cpu is still good enough for office kinda job, youtube and some light gaming
Had to upgrade from X570 to X670E a few months ago. RMA'd a high tier X570 Aorus board and got a refund for almost 400 euros, had to actually pay extra to get a mid tier X670E Asus Strix board. *sigh*
@@tomzpl yeah exactly. we are paying more for hardware with potentially longer lifespans. I'm optimistic that my $200 R5 5600X won't bottleneck for my purposes for another decade.
Just checked Aliexpress, $0.28 for a 0.56" dual 7 segment display. If you buy two singles and slap em together, it's $0.18 total. Neither of those are bulk manufacturer pricing. The board still has to check for errors, so I can't imagine there's much overhead past the 20 cent display. There's really no reason for them to not include something so cheap and useful.
If only RUclips would let you like more than once! Love that GN makes these videos! As a builder, I hate they the MB makers have made the 7 segment only available on the "highend" boards. This should be a standard feature, though I would settle with Steve's accessory option if it were available. Hopefully the manufacturers open their eyes and make this a standard feature again soon. Great video GN!
Ryan, I clicked like button just so you can effectively like more than once. 👍
Literally me this week
> Pc doesn't start, listen for post beep
> Oh no its not posting!
> Wait no there's no speaker
> Check the mobo box, no
> Check the case box, no
> Had to buy a speaker on amazon smh
>Not installing a $3 speaker right from the get go
You played yourself.
Consumers would have no voice without people/groups like you. Thank you Steve and the rest of the team.
That's not even remotely true. Supply and demand is literally economics 101.
And GN is a company that wants to make money of off you. No matter what they say, they say it to make money. And it works.
@@DiahRhiaJones economics 101 is literally a made-up thing, voting with your wallet has never worked and that's exactly why corporations want people to believe it does
Are you saying that the profit motive is bad for consumers? Oh gosh, if only there were an alternative system where workers were in charge of what gets made...
Now it's our chance to have the lunatics take over the asylum. Lunatics Line Up. Ha ha.
@@caramelldansen2204 By workers you mean the state, which never does anything wrong, I love the state.
Completely agree, the LED is so useful nowadays.
I still remember the PC speaker spitting out Morse code for debug info. I still have a little speaker on a few of my machines and still love hearing that little 'beep' on post.
Same, I love my little "post successful" beep.
Haha, I remember one time somebody brought their computer to work, they just build it and it wasn't working, they wanted to have the IT guy look at it. Went to show me what was wrong with it, I heard the little beep, and said "hey wait a minute, a single beep usually means everything is fine." Went around to the back of the computer and they had their video cable plugged into the motherboard instead of the graphics card. 😂 Thank you, little beep!
@@mjc0961 post beeps rock. I have a whole bag of those little speakers and I still put them in every computer I build and every computer I work on that doesn't have one gets one haha
You can still connect the little speaker to modern pc's, all motherboards have the pins for it. The speaker itself is like 2 usd and can get you out of most situations, and usually better than displays, since displays can be obstructed by cables/panels and you usually can hear the speaker.
I still have mine, and its awesome.
Actually, there is a video from Bullzoid, where he comments that for AMD boards, a segment display is not particularly useful, and debug LEDs are sufficient. So I went for a 'mid-range' 300 € board, instead of a more expensive one with slightly better debugging. I thought of looking for that video, but since Bullzoid videos aren't well sorted, it would take too long.
I've still got a case with a proper cardboard-cone speaker in it. The other two machines have had little piezo ones added because the manufacturer (Silverstone to name and shame the guilty) cheaped out and didn't include them.
Debug display/ease of troubleshooting would DEFINITELY make me choose one board over another. Not even something I have to think about. So incredibly nice to have.
It’s ironic that the features that newer builders likely need to diagnose potential mistakes are hidden behind an enthusiast level paywall
I fear it's because of companies praying on the fact new builders are more likely to need them that they get away with it.
Maybe these people shouldn't build a PC if they couldn't handle a basic troubleshooting? You can use a 5 pin speaker to do a basic troubleshooting. 7 segment is not a panacea either, it is only as informative as the amount of error codes it has.
@@dat_21 I feel like the average person would be better able to look up the problem with an error code to look for, rather than having to try and remember a sequence of beeps from a speaker the computer probably didn't come with.
@@johnwolf2349 You can buy a small buzzer for a few bucks. Some motherboard have small LED lights too. 7 segment is not necessary at all. At best it will be easier to read, but as far as troubleshooting information goes it's not terribly useful.
@@dat_21 You're completely missing the point; a new PC builder isn't even going to know a motherboard speaker is a thing to begin with, let alone that it probably doesn't come with their board and they have to go buy one (for which they also probably won't know where to start looking for such a thing). You're clearly looking at this through your enthusiast glasses without even thinking about the ignorance of most new PC builders.
I greatly enjoyed this rant. I'll be happy to see more of that in the future whenever you need to vent.
I will volunteer as a sidekick if Steve ever goes through with this supervillain business. 7-segment display has been one of the best features that has been added to motherboards
"Not now Postcode!"
Name checks out
Actually, most boards DO have headers for external debug LEDs!
These are called TPM/LPC headers. They still present that part of ISA allowing a connected device to read specific I/O port, which the BIOS writes the 8-bit POST code to. Same technology for 40 years, just the connectors changed several times.
Motherboard manufacturers already diverted from standard ISA/PCI for which you could get a card for a few bucks. Now each one has a different LPC header, so they already planned FOR YEARS for you to make this video. Now each will sell their own POST card for $20, instead of you getting one from AliExpress for $2 and that working in all boards. Smart!
I think it's strange that they use the TPM header for this. It's not very good for people who want a TPM module _and_ a 7-segment display.
@@nathangamble125 I don't know a single person who uses external TPM even in an enterprise setting. TPM has been built into the CPU/board for a pretty long time now.
where would i find one for gigabyte b650? im fine with paying an extra $1 or even $20 - instead of paying double for the entire board. I just want the feature.
Thanks a lot for saying this. How would a module that can display the POST code and connects to this port be called?
@@nathangamble125 Nowadays you get TPM built into the CPU, which security people prefer anyways. So the header was empty before and remains empty today.
And it's not strange - TPM needs stable constant connection to the system bus, PCIe doesn't allow that (for power savings mostly), so what's the interface we can use that's already present on the board, with the smallest amount of pins for a new header? LPC! It's slow, it's ancient (25 years, emulating/encapsulating ISA, 42 years old :)), it's perfect!
And from the beginning, by design (!), POST cards can use LPC, as long as you connect them correctly.
According to Wikipedia, Intel has standardized an LPC header for POST cards, but of course manufacturers opted to each invent their own when reintroducing LPC as TPM headers.
It's funny that you mention the DIY/modular idea because once upon a time, ASUS actually had that. I have an old X58 ASUS P6T7 WS board and it doesn't have the debug code LED on the motherboard but it has a pin out interface (uses up TPM) that you can plug a small daughter board into it. The daughter board has debug code LED along with PWR and Reset buttons.
Dude, every time you do the "And you'd THINK they did this because of THIS reason.......... [no followup]", it gets me. Every time.
Also, really felt you on "either he's losing it, or he's REALLY passionate"-> "Yes."
More of this please. I started building in the late 90s and the amount of RBG BS and other aesthetic BS I will never look at or care about because I'm not a teenager has grown dramatically. The only thing I care about looking at is what's on my screen.
I miss ugly brown and blue PCBs
My favorite is cheap, Chinese mouse, keyboard, headsets that are trash covered in RGB and "Gaming" logos that cost almost as much as a good quality one
Believe it or not, everything you don't like is not just the purview of teenagers. "I don't like it so it must be stupid teenagers".
Brilliant.
@Mergatroid Mania
Okay zoomer.
They can color the mobo pcb whatever they want - green, brown, whatever's cheapest. My case will never need a window on it. The thing is going to sit tightly on a shelf where I will never ever look at it unless it has a problem.
Laughed out loud at the rant, but it's spot-on. I'm putting together my first new build in about a decade and the biggest shock was mobo prices. I ended up settling on that MSI Carbon board you highlighted because I wanted a 7-segment display and it was the cheapest Z790 I could find that had one! It costs twice as much as the most expensive mobo I've ever bought. Stuff is straight-up insane.
As someone who was shopping for motherboards I was shocked to see how crap they've gotten.
its honestly a joke, ugh try shopping for a new chair, I looked at 5-7 different sites and its all the same garbage just reskinned there is nothing of quality anymore!
They have, but at least you can get a board with quality vrms at a decent cost now. The problem is just knowing which one has them 😅 speaking of crap, I loved Wendell's video of the sonic the hedgehog mini itx board (iirc), where he managed to break off like half the leds on the back just by using his bare table as a work surface. Quality!
I mostly just buy ASRock or MSI Pro entry level Motherboards for Intel Platforms, because it isnt worth anymore to spend more unless you need better VRMs for overclocking or squeezing the last bit of Turbo a higher end CPU.
I stopped buying consumer mtb years ago now its just server based mtb
I have the Z690 version of the board Steve had on his table, and it cost me under $350 about a year ago.
"As long as it's clear what it DOES work with"
Yes, so much yes!
Spoken straight from my heart as well, mate... even back in the day when I built my current system (i7 8700K, Z-370), I had to put in serious and genuine _research_ just to figure out what type, brand, and speed rating of RAM I can actually use with Board X or Board Y.
Manufacturers should really be forced to make this as straightforward to find **and understand** as possible!
Another feature that has become "premium" is having 5x 3.5mm audio jacks.
Yup, that's really annoying. I have Logitech Z5500 5.1 speakers, and all my audio jacks are full. So only input I have left is the case front mic socket.
But "the market has shown consumers are choosing Bluetooth"
Yeah, I wonder why....
Or God forbid 6x3.5mm because we ALL need toslink which can't at all be supplement with HDMI in most cases
Exactly! I had to rule out alot of motherboard because they only have 2-3 Jacks on the motherboard I/o. I want my separate line in and line out jack.
Back in 2015 I bought a B85 board for like $100 with 6 of them. These days mobos that cost 3 times more only have 2 of them. It's crazy.
The disappearing of debug LEDs was something that always disappointed me. Still remember back in 2013 when I bought my Gigabyte UD4H Z87 board, it not only had a debug LED, but also a power button that lit up when power was connected along with a bios reset button, which are features I really miss now. It seems like ever since the market shifted to "Gaming" oriented stuff, all these features became basically unobtainable for the budget limited builders
The gaming look is so childish too. I don't want a motherboard that is dressed up like a transformer toy.
Yeah the debug display is one of the mandatory features for me. My X570 Aorus Master has one. I also like it when they can let you use it as a CPU temperature readout once booted.
Debug LEDs where included in b550 and b560 maybe not the screen but the LED that would narrow down the issue to memory or CPU where present. the fact that even a basic LED without the display is missing on some of the mid range boards is really annoying and making life difficult for a beginners.
@@volvo09 That's just it, isn't it? These are boards designed to be purchased by a wealthy father for their 13 year old brat who decides what to get by how cool, slick, and expensive something is going to look when they show it to their friends.
@@volvo09 Me neither, but I am also mature enough to just not care
I love this. I'm used to rant videos being annoying, so the way you express your thoughts here are really important, and you nailed it. I genuinely want to know your personal and professional opinions about hardware, outside of reviews and performance charts, and I think your insight and outreach can make a difference when you bring up alternative solutions to these problems. I'd like to see more pieces like these across a lot of different topics.
My ASUS X570 has the debug LEDs and it’s just… so nice to hit the power button and know which stage of the boot it’s in. On the rare occasion I’ve had issues it shows me exactly where it got stuck. 10/10 feature I’d prefer to never buy a board without.
I picked this board based on your reviews a few years ago, and I remember the debug display was one of the tipping points when you explained why it was handy.
He specifically explains why those debug LED's are garbage. Im sure its "so nice" to see it stuck on RAM only whenever you have an issue, and it must be even nicer to have to hold your hand against the glass to be able to see what is even lit up in the first place.
@@celeriumlerium8266 I can see the debug leds from a cross the room lol. No problem at all seeing them through the glass.
Maybe that’s a bigger issue on smoked glass builds
When catering to a market filled with people who know next to nothing about actual performance and think that looking cooler means a better computer than something that runs anything you throw at it, these are all things that are bound to happen.
exactly, corporations always try to milk the customer, an informed customer is the last thing they want, and when you buy Apple it's already over for you
Yup. Edgy kids whose parents are paying for everything look at the "ROGROGROGROGROGROGROG" and "FOR THOSE WHO DARE FOR THOSE WHO DARE" and think "oooo this will make me such an edgy gaming gamer! Who cares it's a Z790 and I have a 5300g, I must buy!"
@@bigbubba0439 yeah i don't think its kids, its middle aged manchildren. kids don't have the money to blow on overpriced pc hardware. a trend i've seen is that people who have never built a computer before, see how easy it is, and buy one and treat it as if they are experts at building computers. but being a newbie, they make amateur mistakes and nonsensical long-term plans they don't want to admit they made because they spent a lot of money on it.
I'm not trying to gatekeep here but spending $3000 on a white computer when the same hardware could be had for $800 is not something that a child has the discretionary funding to do, it's the exact same people who buy mustangs with tinted windows even though they're slower than a honda civic
@@Cheesemonk3h To be fair, whenever anyone tries to get into building PCs and looks for help because they don't understand, all they get told by people with more experience is an entirely unhelpful explanation (by explaining it in terms only an experienced person would understand), or "what is there not to understand? It's so easy any idiot could do it," rather than people actually trying to help them understand. I have trouble blaming newbies for making seemingly obvious mistakes when those they look to for help make no effort whatsoever.
I'd like to believe that this weren't the norm, but I've been working on computers for around 15 years, and maybe only seen one or two times where this wasn't the case with inexperienced people looking for help.
@@Cheesemonk3h I'm kinda a newb but I guess I fall in the middle, my first build was a 1060/ryzen 1300x, didn't care how it looked, didn't have even have a case window, now I'm building a new one based on a Gigabyte Vision 3060ti and yeah I do want it to be white and look cool, but I also was pretty bummed coming back to the PC parts market to see it saturated with "graffiti boards" and I was wondering why no boards had debug LEDs because that's a key feature for me and welp, now I know why. Like yeah I want an NZXT N7, but for $300? paying for aesthetic. Everything else in white wasn't much of a mark up.
The VRM was one of the main things people complained about for years so that's what we ended up getting. And now its colorful lighting.
Steve's rants are the best! So well-justified and objectively true, they highlight in humorous fashion the sad state of industry trends. These are not only entertaining but also informative, don't feel bad for doing these every once in a while 😄
The coveted rare source for 7 segment debug LEDs is the 3-tailed Jabberwocky Hootinanny birds of outer southern lower Borneo. These are the only birds that lay eggs containing these rare 7 segment LEDs. Unfortunately, there are only 2 birds of this species left.
Thanks for the great rant. This is what I went through on my last build - ending up with a bunch of LEDs I didn't want in order to get a feature / support that I did want. It works well, but I still feel semi-abused. Rant on, Steve!
Agreed. Thanks for making this. The problem is that manufacturers are marketing to kids that buy computers as fashion accessories. The RGB and excessive bling is embarrassing.
@@matthew7419 "marketing to kids" seems to be exactly what's going on - especially kids with rich parents ...
By far one of the best tech tuber videos in years. I hope manufacturers are taking notes.
I actually had a 7-seg display on my last motherboard, which was super helpful. Was pissed when I couldn’t find a new 790 board with it under $500, glad I’m not the only one who noticed.
I found this exact issue that you are having to be incredibly frustrating for myself. I personally prefer having the 7 segment display to enable debugging. Makes trouble shooting WAY easier. Went to go build a system in 2022 and was completely blown away that everything that had it was super expensive.
I'm glad you made a video about this. I was recently helping a friend troubleshoot his new DDR5 build and was surprised his $300 motherboard did not come with a debug display. It made the entire process way more annoying than it needed to be. Locking debug features, especially such an inexpensive one, behind a paywall is unacceptable.
This is what exactly what I thought when I started upgarding my computer last year. It's so insane to have a mid/high tier mobo to have barely basic functioning.
yeah same, i build my pc like 1-2 years ago with a Z690 Tomahawk i was shocked that even with very much discount i payed fckn 220€ (at that time normally 300) for that board atm where are basically no features for anything that piece of crap doesnt have any usefull feature youll get some IO and 4 M.2 slots thats it
I freaking love you guys, always fighting for us the consumers! I really hope something changes.
Been researching for good motherboard to replace my 9 year old 4th Gen Intel rig. Was so surprised that the debug function was only available on expensive motherboards. And not even not all expensive motherboard had that feature which also include onboard power and reset button. My Z97 Asrock Mobo have this function and it helps alot when doing troubleshooting especially doing overclock.
Hope those manufacturer bring back these features on middle budget motherboards as well.
To me it's all not worth it. I'd just buy a sub 100 dollar board and just not bother overclocking. Also take a look at the QVL to see which RAM actually runs at XMP.
This is the perfect video. I could not agree more Steve. Motherboards of this generation are absolutely insane and manufacturers have lost their minds. I honestly believe that overpriced skus need to be purposely left on the shelf by us they can learn a hard lesson in appropriately valuing and serving their customers. It’s just wild to think that even just a couple years ago top shelf SKUs we’re all less than $400 to $500, whereas useful “all you need” SKUs were around $200. A perfect example is the Asus Crosshair boards. The X370 Crosshair VI Hero for Zen 1 was $289 at Microcenter. Today’s Asus X670 Crosshair Hero for Zen 4 is $700! Worse yet that’s reflective of basically the whole market! More than doubling the price in 4 to 5 years?! It’s criminal! Manufacturers are using the fallout from the coof as an excuse to get away with murder.
Pfizer already did that
@@darkomenz794 💯
I'm absolutely with Steve on this rant and it's needed! Really hope there will be more rants like this from enough corners to induce some form of rethinking by manufacturers.
Planing a build right now to replace my 8 1/2 year old rig with shifting focus and the search for the right Mobo has driven me nuts so far with pricing for basic features I want like the debug display. Finally (hopefully - maybe - I think) settled on the MSI Z790 Carbon. Still way too expensive but at least has the features I want (mostly, with a couple drawbacks). Used to have Asus but heard too much about problems with memory lanes on the new z790s there to deter me. And too much bling-bling.
This rant is perfectly valid, i had a dual Bios debug display board back in the DDR3 days and it cost me the equivilent of $150 brand new. Was excellent and helped me a lot as a novice
As someone who was out of the build market for the last few years, I saw new prices and did a spit take. Nice to see a breakdown of the insanity. Also "To that I say, 'YES'" and had to pause the video from the laughing. Brilliant. As usual Steve, keep up the great work.
Easy way to make this into its own playlist series and do one maybe once a month or so, so it doesn't get played out.
We love you GN team thank you for all your work!
Debug readout is the number one thing I lookout for when getting a new motherboard. I was surprised back when I moved to 12th gen that it was somewhat similar in pricing that it was pretty price to get one from MSI or Asus with a debug readout. I got a Gigabyte motherboard which was one of the more affordable ones coming in under $300 for a Z690 with a debug readout.
Loved this rant. It's definitely hard to do stuff like this all the time, but next time you're feeling ranty I'd totally be down to watch a video on it again, this was pretty great.
That camouflage bit, tho 💀
“Game first work second” and Steve’s reaction has me rolling lmao