"Gaming" boards and all that pastic

[koffiejunkie]

I've been looking into options for upgrading my PC, and I notice PC motherboards are covered in all manner of plastic (or metal?) coverings. Something like this:

They're also often covered in LEDs. I get that "gamers", for some or other reason, want their PCs to look like the inside of some dystopian scene from their games. Each to their own.

I don't want any of this though, but it seems the boards that aren't decorated in this fashion also tend to be the ones that don't have the features I'm looking for. For example, you'd think there would be some decent Threadripper workstation boards out there - comparable to what's available for i9/Xeon procs, but it seems to be all disco spaceship designs.

My question: Can this stuff be removed? I use a very very nice Micro-ATX box and it's hard enough getting stuff in and out and recovering dropped screws. I'm also wondering how this restricts what heatsinks I can fit in there - particularly the bit over the back-plate ports.

 

[RedViking]

Got to have them LED's and vinyls....


Put it in a closed case so you don't see the insides.

 

[Stefan.dl]

Those coverings are more often than not also heatsinks that improve the thermal performance of various components on your board and is not just there for looks. The LEDs can be switched off too if you don't fancy it.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Those coverings are more often than not also heatsinks that improve the thermal performance of various components on your board and is not just there for looks.

Thanks, I hadn't considered that.

 

[gboy]

Yup, same issue here, if it says "Game" its more expensive.

 

[rustypup]

Those coverings are more often than not also heatsinks

Airflow management.

Heatsink is the piece responsible for soaking the heat up and radiating it elsewhere - through a fan - into water, etc.

 

[Johnatan56]

What is it that you need/want on the mobo?

 

[GMAN03]

Got to have them LED's and vinyls....


Put it in a closed case so you don't see the insides.

Closed cases are getting hard to come by though. So much tempered glass on the market.

 

[koffiejunkie]

What is it that you need/want on the mobo?

General purpose, really. I don't game at all.

 

[RedViking]

General purpose, really. I don't game at all.

don't have the features I'm looking for

What features?

 

[koffiejunkie]

Closed cases are getting hard to come by though. So much tempered glass on the market.

Yeah I noticed this too. And like with the motherboards, much of the internal design/features I look for are clustered in the cases that look like a railgun in Doom.

 

[genetic]

I've been looking into options for upgrading my PC, and I notice PC motherboards are covered in all manner of plastic (or metal?) coverings. Something like this:

They're also often covered in LEDs. I get that "gamers", for some or other reason, want their PCs to look like the inside of some dystopian scene from their games. Each to their own.

I don't want any of this though, but it seems the boards that aren't decorated in this fashion also tend to be the ones that don't have the features I'm looking for. For example, you'd think there would be some decent Threadripper workstation boards out there - comparable to what's available for i9/Xeon procs, but it seems to be all disco spaceship designs.

My question: Can this stuff be removed? I use a very very nice Micro-ATX box and it's hard enough getting stuff in and out and recovering dropped screws. I'm also wondering how this restricts what heatsinks I can fit in there - particularly the bit over the back-plate ports.

Those are heatsinks for the VRM's, chipset and MVMe SSD's and whatnot. It's not plastic.

Also you can switch the LED's off in the BIOS.

 

[koffiejunkie]

What features?

10G networking, preferrably Intel. Three full speed PCIe slots (16x, 16x, 8x), four (an extra x8) if there isn't 10G onboard. This is frustratingly difficult to find in, expecially in Micro-ATX, since the PCIe slots often share PCIe lanes with the M.2 slots. S/PDIF audio, enough SATA ports, etc. Obviously, some things will be compromised

 

[Johnatan56]

10G networking, preferrably Intel. Three full speed PCIe slots (16x, 16x, 8x), four (an extra x8) if there isn't 10G onboard. This is frustratingly difficult to find in, expecially in Micro-ATX, since the PCIe slots often share PCIe lanes with the M.2 slots. S/PDIF audio, enough SATA ports, etc. Obviously, some things will be compromised

So Threadripper 3rd gen I assume, so X570? What are you using to need x16 x16 x8? Assuming you mean PCIe 3 levels of bandwidth for that and not PCIe 4?

So PCIe 4 x8 x8 x4 should be fine? Note a 10Gbps Ethernet connection will be saturated by a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot (10Gbps = 1.25GB/s, or 2.5GB/s if transferring at max speed in both directions, which I highly doubt you'll be doing, also 10Gbps equipment is quite expensive and rarely worth going for compared to 2.5Gbps Ethernet), most of the time even a PCIe 4.0 x1 won't be a bottleneck. Are you sure you understand what your requirements actually are? And you near always want your main M.2 slot to have a the fastest connection as it's

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

On that pic top and left chunks are the vrm cooling and bottom is chipset and m.2

 

[koffiejunkie]

So Threadripper 3rd gen I assume, so X570?

Sigh, that would be nice. Prices are a bit stiff though! Incidentally, I see the same issue there. Only four manufacturers make sTRX4 boards, and they're all gamer. A proper workstation board would be nice there.

What are you using to need x16 x16 x8? Assuming you mean PCIe 3 levels of bandwidth for that and not PCIe 4?

Yes, probably don't need 4.0 - my stuff are all 3.0 for now, but then I tend to go big on upgrades and then keep it running for as long as possible, so it's good to be as future proof as possible.

As for PCIe, right now I'm using 1x16 for GPU, 1x8 for RAID controller, and 1x8 for 40gbit NIC (intel X710). I'm only using 10gbit (it's a 4x10 port) but was planning to up that to 20gibt/s as the NAS can read and burst write at over 10gibit and I have one spare port there.

"General purpose" was probably the wrong word to use, I should have said "wide variety". I just meant to say I don't game. I do a bunch of different things that push the boundaries in one aspect or another. Video work can end up being a phenomenal amount of data - hence fast networking to a NAS. At work I'm increasingly getting involved in projects that use GPGPU and FPGA type hardware (still way out of my depth here), so I'm trying to familiarise myself with the hardware and toolchain (cupy can be fun!), so the extra 16x port will probably be filled with something along those lines - depends on what I can scavange.

None of this is business criticle, so like I said, I expect to make some compromises.

And you near always want your main M.2 slot to have a the fastest connection as it's

Not much of a concern for me. Once the OS and application has loaded, almost everything I do is off the NAS - my SATA SSDs do just fine for the foreseeable future.

 

[CataclysmZA]

My question: Can this stuff be removed?

...

I'm also wondering how this restricts what heatsinks I can fit in there - particularly the bit over the back-plate ports.

Most of it can be removed, but there are plastic shrouds on the heatsinks which are purely cosmetic that are also difficult to remove.

A lot of the shields you see on boards like these are actually plastic, but in some higher-end boards they are steel or aluminium. The marketing for these things implies that it's a heat spreader, but most of the time they are actually not thermally conductive enough to do a good job at removing heat.

Ironically, ASUS initially marketed these things as dust shields. That's really what most of them amount to.

Tyan has a workstation-class Threadripper motherboard, the Tomcat EX S8020 (TR4), which you can read about here:

TYAN® Computer - AMD Ryzen Board

www.tyan.com

Tyan Tomcat SX S8020 AMD Ryzen Threadripper Server Motherboard

We saw the Tyan Tomcat SX S8020, an AMD Ryzen Threadripper server motherboard at Computex 2019 and have an update on the Tyan S8020 AM4 Ryzen platform

www.servethehome.com

ASRock's Enterprise sub-brand, ASRock Rack, has a sTRX4 motherboard available:

ASRock Rack > TRX40D8-2N2T

www.asrockrack.com

Both ASRock Rack and Tyan have workstation motherboards for Ryzen desktop processors as well. Considering that you want a board in a mATX form factor, X570 or some kind of Z490 workstation hybrid would be the best bet.

ASRock Rack > X570D4U

www.asrockrack.com

ASRock Rack > X470D4U

www.asrockrack.com

ASRock Rack > X570D4U-2L2T

www.asrockrack.com

You can get EPYC workstation boards in mATX sizes, but it is pricey.

The cheapest almost-workstation-like motherboard you can buy as a consumer is probably the ASRock B550 Steel Legend, primarily for the 2.5G NIC and the port 80 LED, but the LAN is a Realtek RTL8125BG. Not ideal.

 

[saor]

Those coverings are more often than not also heatsinks that improve the thermal performance of various components on your board and is not just there for looks. The LEDs can be switched off too if you don't fancy it.

Probably also keep the dust away. No point having exposed circuit boards inside a box that inevitably gets dusty,

 

[koffiejunkie]

Tyan has a workstation-class Threadripper motherboard, the Tomcat EX S8020 (TR4), which you can read about here:

TYAN® Computer - AMD Ryzen Board

www.tyan.com

Oooh, I completley forgot they exist. Hasn't shown up in any of the online retailers either. We used to use them at an old job (had a few thousand) and they were solid. I'll read up on this.

As for ASRock Rack, I've had too much drama. Too many failures, and too much trouble getting stuff RMAd. Their boards do look nice though!

 

[ponder]

Oooh, I completley forgot they exist. Hasn't shown up in any of the online retailers either. We used to use them at an old job (had a few thousand) and they were solid. I'll read up on this.

Yeah tyan is usually pretty solid for workstation/server boards.