Guess what? Yep, you guessed it right, one more on Z390. I'm not going to explain what Z390 motherboards are, as really you've read it all by now. But ASUS made a rather sizable mistake, their suppo... Whoops: ASUS Lists all (19) their upcoming Z390 motherboards on its support page
Hmm the Z390 Dragon seems interesting. But 19 motherboards on the same chip set seems a little over the top.
I was thinking the same thing. How could there possibly be enough variations for this to be worth it? 19 motherboards by a single brand for an entire CPU socket is a good amount, but 19 for a single chipset? This isn't like the early 2010s where we had a lot more options to choose from such as color scheme, PCI (non-express) slots, Crossfire or SLI (or both) slot configurations, ATA ports, 3rd party RAID controllers, and so on. Nowadays, every board is grayscale with RGB headers, most features people care about are provided by the CPU rather than the chipset, mGPU (for gaming) is becoming increasingly rare, and just about everything is either based on PCIe or USB. Asus could probably get away with making only 5x boards (2x ATX, 2 mATX, and maybe 1x ITX) and nobody would notice a difference. The wifi variants are unnecessary - just give users the M.2 or mini PCIe slot with the antennas and let the user buy their own card. If some boards sacrifice PCIe slots for more M.2 storage slots, why not just make a PCIe M.2 expansion card? For each of these boards, Asus has to pay someone for: * The design * The manufacturing process * Testing * Writing BIOS/EFI code * Writing manuals * Creating box art * Advertising And so on. It'd be much cheaper and less overwhelming to consumers if they didn't pull this crap.
So, this huge lineup means that Z370 is really being replaced. Hard to blame ASUS for replacing EOL product which intel decided to dump after 9 months.
So what's the problem? If you don't like it, don't buy it Ryzen got x370 chipset 1? Year ago. Now it's x470. No problem, just newer and "tweaked" for the better.
It tells the story, same one as many times before with intel. It is called: "damn quick obsolescence" So, no problem here since I opt to realize that. And it tells another story, but I am not in mood to give you another spasm and denial seizure. Chipset is not that important, it is 'just' that part of picture which is made for purpose... to prevent viewer from seeing bigger picture. Interesting part will be GB MT test between 6C/12T and 8C/16T variant. But no need to skip ahead of time.
Well is the same old story, you are still able to buy a x370 it did not go EOL. When a product gets EOL is hard to get replacement in case of failure, i want to know how asus will handle warranty in case of faulty z370 in the european 2 year life span. Bios updates? unlikely. Meltdown and similar protection? unsure. Having a new product that went quickly in EOL is unpleasant, there is no need to be AMD or INTEL fan we can agree on this.
I could be wrong but i think things are a little different and that´s why they have so many boards. From my understanding Asus only creates 3 or 4 different boards with all the bells and whistles and then they create several versions of the same boards but with less extras. So they create an high end board with everything they have then they create a cheaper version of that board without Wi-Fi and 3/4 way SLI, then they create another version of that cheaper one without other stuff and so on... This way they only have to design, validate and create material for 3 or 4 different boards because all the others are just variations of those same boards without some expensive stuff so they can hit all the price points the market requires. All this to say that it´s probably very cheap to create 19 "different" boards...
I see what you're saying, but my point is there aren't really that many more bells and whistles between the high-end boards and their lesser counterparts, and a lot of the variants (like boards with or without wifi) aren't necessary. There is enough change to warrant 2 or 3 variations, but any more than that seems unnecessary. Remember, we're talking about a single chipset here, not the CPU socket as a whole. You do have a valid point there, but, I still think the sheer amount of variants doesn't pay off in the end. Again, you have to consider this is just accounting for Z390.
