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Are the days of colorful PCB's past us?

severus

severus

Senior member
I've noticed an increasing trend by motherboard manufacturers towards black PCBs with colord PCI express slots and heatsinks, however I remember a variety of PCB colors back when Intel released Conroe and even more so during the Athlon XP hayday. MSI had red boards, Gigabyte a teal color, Asus had those dreadful brownish ones. We do have less manufacturers making boards now. Abit, AOpen, Soyo, and many others have folded. I guess the new streamlined approach; "You can have any color you like as long as it's black," is the way of the future?
 
XavierMace said:
I for one welcome the change. I do not miss DFI's or Gigabyte's rainbow boards in the slightest.
Click to expand...

Probably for the first time in years, I spent $20 on three dual cold-cathode light kits. Bling! My ASUS Sabertooth Z170 S is "Arctic Camo," a combination of whites and grays. So it helps in reflecting the green light from the cold-cathodes.

But when it really comes down to the wire, I don' need no lights; don' need no colors. I just need a well-planned cooling strategy and a decent case in which to execute it.

Anyway, "different colors" is a more recent phenomenon than established: the PCBs once were only green. If you're looking to impress your girlfriend, what are the odds that "Bling" will encourage her to polish your knob? It's purely "peripheral" -- unlike the handle on the center of our being.
 
I might just have to buy a DFI board now, just for the novelty... actually still have a somewhat colorful Abit around here somewhere

The first board I bought when I became a hobbyist was a nice tannish brown color with brown slots... it's like they tried to make it an actual turd.

Fast forward to 2016 and all of my choice PCB are either black or silver.
 
I liked all the red, gold and blue boards of the past with their multi-colored parts. I also liked the graphics cards with their flamboyant designs and characters on the shroud. Today's hardware is kind of blah.
 
Personally I liked how leadtek and gainward graphics cards looked in the Geforce 3 & 4 era. my favorite motherboards were the Abit orange and blue ones and the Soyo dragon purple boards.
 
I think it goes to all black in everything now, cases, screens and internal components, are all mostly black these days.
 
I miss the colourful PCBs since they used to tell you the quality and performance of the board in question. Now they're all just black... how am I supposed to compare boards to each other now?
 
The DIY mobo market has been in a slump for several years now, so I doubt offering more PCB colors will be high on the priority list.
 
I remember those days. I had several of Gigabyte's red Socket A boards, a black and neon-green Epox board. I currently have two Gigabyte 775 boards, which was around the time they started to tone them down, with blue PCBs, orange and purple SATA ports, gold heatsinks, red/yellow DIMM slots and a bright blue PCIE slot. My server is a Sabertooth x79, which is a nice board being black with yellow highlights (DIMMs, PCIEs).
 
Honestly, I miss the colorful boards. It sucks having all boards look the same. All my cases have no windows so it really doesn't matter. I do like my build to look nice though.
 
I miss the lighter colors and especially brown because back in the day I used to mod boards for o'c and you could more easily see traces, reverse engineer subcircuits and target soldering, and see heat damage progressing from the board turning darker, though these days I don't have those concerns any longer and while the black looks ugly to me, it does make white silkscreened labeling stand out more.
 
I miss all the old mobo manufacturers.
ABit, AOpen, IWill, EpoX, etc.

Pretty sure I still have a lot of them in the closet somewhere.
Might be fun to fire up the old BP6 w/ dual Celly 300As @ 450MHz running under Peltiers again 🙂
Hope to God I never have to hear another black-label Delta again though 😱
 
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