Sound familiar? Lots more goot insights in that article, well worth reading (and it's not very long).--JorgeA Intel (as well as other board manufacturers) are running into the same problem with their desktop boards. The first problem is that there are too many of them available per generation. Every time a new generation of boards come out, I'm tasked with testing at most 10 different Intel boards to make sure everything works. TEN BOARDS. The differences between these boards are very small. Number of PCI-E Xx slots, number of memory slots, form factor. That's pretty much the differences between all the boards they sell. The other guys (Asus, MSI, etc) have the same problem. Too many options for too few customers who actually care. I know where all this comes from. A lot of it is left over from the enthusiast days, and the rest is aimed at companies who build devices. Except those products should be kept away from the retail channel if that is the case. If at every new generation a single manufacturer only released 3 boards based on form factor, it would be better. Intel (and others) wouldn't need to spend all that time doing R&D on making a bunch of different things that do the same thing. The second problem is that Intel has been changing CPU keying in each of the past few generations. I've got a few different gens available to me that I have to re-test for various reasons. While all the CPUs look the same (and are the same size) they have 3 different keyings, meaning you can't actually put that CPU in the socket even if it is an LGA115X. This means that you have physical incompatibility issues between generations. And the last problem is that these different generations (Intel 6/7/8 series chipsets) are coming out too close together. I worked on the 7 series and maybe had 4 months off before the Haswell (8 series) stuff came out. And in the end, very few people actually care about the difference between the different generations of boards. Even AMD can fall into this category. Desktop boards have been pretty much the same (in a working sense) since the Core 2 Quad CPUs came out, which I think was in the Q35 and 5x chipsets for Intel. Sure the i Series CPUs are technically better, but engineers, gamers and other high-end users are the only ones who care about things like that. To me, there is no difference between this gaggle of boards that came out the past 2 or 3 years and a standard user can get by using something a few generations old still with no issue.