There are many times that products are too specialized for widespread usage, but it is a much more common situation to see items that have the exact opposite problem. In the world of consumerism, it is natural for companies to try to make a product as appealing to as many people as they can, and often try to achieve this by cramming in as many features as possible. While it may look appealing on the surface, the result is often that these multi-dimensional items simply can't do any of the functions particularly well. On the other hand, the highly specialized items may not be able to accomplish everything you need it to do. This leaves one trying to find the item that best fits their needs. It can sometimes be very tempting to always go with the ?more?, but only until you find out where the associated 'less? comes in.

This situation exists in motherboards perhaps more than any other single component a builder is going to need. There are plenty of motherboards out there that offer a world of features at a low price, many times lower than other seemingly less capable boards. They seem like a great deal until you find out the actual limitations of the features. 7.1 audio would seem like a nice feature, until you notice the specs point to bad separation and signal to noise, and you may be inclined to give up the additional USB 2.0 ports in favor of a board with a better audio solution. Or you may need more than the typical, or more precise, fan control. It would seem a board with eight fan headers would be perfect, until you find out that the control over the headers is very limited. In that case, a board able to tie specific headers to specific locations with custom curves would be a far better choice. To date, the only board that I have seen do this is the ASUS TUF Series, more commonly known as the Sabertooth.