Big photo of a motherboard.. What kind of monstrosity of a mobo is that? Please tell me all that shit on it is metal and has some sort of cooling purpose. It looks like a bunch of moulded plastic to make it 'look cool'.
Unfortunately, the path to the best hardware on PC is usually with gamer hardware, which means you end up with hardware with pointless bling attached.
Thanks user persona centered design!
The keyboard and mouse on my work desktop are gamer gear, as is my work laptop (my next one might even be an Alienware). And boy, do I hate their radioactive glowing.
The MSIs are nice (as are Razers, etc), but I'll probably stick to a major vendor like Dell (Alienware), Lenovo or HP - in other words, a company with an established support infrastructure.
I've also been super impressed with the physical touchpad buttons, port array and OLED screen on the Alienware 13 R3. The catch is that it's relatively heavy and ugly. BUT, the heaviest I'm willing to go is around the weight of my old 2011 15" MBP (~5 pounds and change), and it comes in around that weight.
The new XPS 15 with 1050 also is a top contender for me, although the ports leave me wanting.
-- edit - forgot to mention that the lack of touchscreens also put MSI's GS series near the bottom of my list.
I bought my license of DisplayFusion (multiple monitor utility for Windows) [1] on Steam because it was cheaper (during one of those regular Steam sales) and the license allows me to run it on any of my machines with Steam installed.
Sometimes, yes... but in this case, it appears to be a large heatsink spread out over the mobo. Gamer mobo's are often setup to be overclocked, so larger-than-normal heatsinks are common.
It won't have the giant dust shield, extra power phases, or gamer LAN, or access points on the board for voltage testers, or no thunderbolt, but it'll have quality components and an Intel LAN and a good sound chip. If you aren't overclocking, they are functionally identical.
Sometimes yes. A lot of times though, the chipset will be different on the "lower-end" boards, ie. 990FX vs 990 chipset, etc.
Just be careful when selecting your board, as it does often determine the maximum performance of your system - and you don't want it to be a bottleneck to your other expensive components.
Edit: It comes with two independent LED zones built-in http://rog.asus.com/media/1483473467178.jpg , and headers to control 4 meters of LED light strips, not to mention coordination with compatible glowy RAM sticks. http://rog.asus.com/media/148345887868.jpg . But the PCIe slots are actually steel-reinforced, so it's only about 85% eye-candy. http://rog.asus.com/media/1483459091833.jpg "In fact, if you give the Code a home in a tempered glass chassis, it’s practically impossible not to end up with a system that looks rather special." That's a quote from the press release!
>Thanks to 3D-printing technology, it is now possible. Some of the new motherboards include dedicated mounting points for 3D printable parts, and we’re providing source files that users can download and print using an online 3D-printing service or their own printer.
That's a neat feature. I wonder if such things will catch on in the mainstream as 3d-printing becomes more prevalent.