There is an interesting and entertaining article over at Bit-tech about the way in which the industry is currently miss-representing enthusiasts or enthusiast products. The main thrust of the article is about chipsets and motherboards.

 

After spending many years in the industry and seeing both sides, I can understand his interpretation of the state of play. I also get the impression that he kind of came into the game at about the half way point as he doesn’t touch on any of the older hard-core stuff from the dawn of the enthusiast case mod building days. He seems to blame the manufacturers for wanting to produce everything as enthusiast products and goes into BIOS and voltages available to the average user.

 

Unfortunately, it’s not the manufacturers that have forced the products this way, it’s the enthusiast media that have done this. I’ve seen it time and time again for years – if these options aren’t available, then no matter how stable the board is or how many great features it has, it just won’t get the thumbs up from an enthusiast website. The countless motherboard round-ups that would praise or condemn a board over 1% performance variance, was just crazy. And there’s no difference now because, let’s face it, motherboards are not the processor, they’re not the graphics card, they are the interface between them. Technology has got to the stage now where there is really not a lot of room for improvement. They are communicating with the devices extremely efficiently. On the AMD side there is not even a memory controller available to tweak anymore as it’s built into the CPU. And in the dawn of the “enthusiast” revolution, memory performance and memory controllers were the major difference between chipsets.

 

Although I might not agree with his analysis, it is an entertaining read.