PCA Forums

I agree. I also am saddened by the lack of general creativity when building a PC. It's all off the shelf components.

I hate the crap that's on some motherboards now. I don't know who would want plastic shields over their heatsinks. The RGB lighting doesn't bother me too much as long as it can be toned down.

The mobo on my new workstation had a useless plastic shield over the power regulator heat sinks. Had to remove it anyway because it also blocked the video card.

I have seen plastic shields that help direct the flow of air, but otherwise, I'm not into it.

I was browsing the Z270 ATX boards on newegg. It's very difficult to find a plain board these days. I really hate the plastic covers around the CPU socket. Supermicro make a nice plain looking board but it's far too expensive for an 1151 socket. If I'm paying a $240 premium for a board, I'm going with an X99 chipset. The MSI SLI-Plus is the best looking board out of the bunch in my opinion. They also dropped the virtually useless SATA-express and devoted those lanes to the M.2. I'm still confused on how M.2 is implemented as it seems every manufacture is different. Some use SATA ports and some utilize the third PCI slot.