I had my last motherboard from 2005–last week and I only made two performance upgrades by choice. It was a Socket A motherboard that I carried over an old AMD Athlon Thunderbird over before upgrading to an Athlon XP-M months later. I later upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB after DDR was obsolete, and I also had to make two other upgrades to replace failed parts—one being the onboard LAN and the other being my video card. I also made countless hard drive upgrades, but those had more to do with improving capacity rather than performance.
Honestly, I cheaped out in virtually every way possible with the last motherboard. It was DOA because I should have done a true new build in 2005 and went Socket 939, but instead, I thought I would be clever by keeping a CPU through a motherboard upgrade and then vice versa a few months later. I've come to realize that all the backwards socket compatibility that AMD likes to maintain isn't necessarily good in the long run because you get tricked into thinking that an incremental upgrade will actually help when most people don't benefit much from it. Thankfully, there haven't been any new frameworks lately like a new instruction set (x86-64), storage interface (SATA), or graphics card slot (PCIe). Those three things came out at around the same time and I got caught on the wrong end of it all.
I don't think it makes sense to do performance upgrades on a motherboard when the upgrade cannot beat obsolescence. That's the position that some Core 2 owners find themselves in now.
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