Why buying the most expensive motherboard for a given platform makes you an idiot

I don't have a problem with expensive hardware. If I could afford it I'd buy a 3090 Ti. I do have a problem with people paying more for a worse product. A 3090Ti is just better than a 3090. It's faster and the build quality is much better. The same is not true with motherboards.

The issue is that most of the time the most expensive board for a given platform simply isn't the best.

 

For example the Z690 Godlike which at the time of writing is 1200USD. 

When it comes to memory performance it's just worse than the 470USD Z690 Unify-X because a daisy chain topology simply can't do the speeds that a 1 dimm per channel topology can. So if you care about having the absolutely best CPU+RAM performance the Godlike doesn't have it.

In terms of features the Z690 Godlike uses the exact same Marvell AQC113C 10G lan controller found on the 470USD Gigabyte Z690 Aorus master.

The Z690 Godlike uses the exact same 105A power stages that the Z690 Unify-X uses.

In terms of Vcore regulation the Z690 Dark/Apex/Tachyon should either match or beat the godlike as they use similar or better output filtering components.

The Godlike has an 8 layer PCB. Same as the Z690 Unify-X or Apex. It's actually less layers than the Z690 Tachyon and Dark. This in and of itself doesn't really do anything to performance but it's worth pointing out that you aren't really getting more PCB for your 1200USD compared to a 400-850USD boards.

Now it would be tempting to think that at 1200USD the Godlike would at least get better BIOS support. However in practice motherboard manufacturers put most of the BIOS development effort into the popular boards not the expensive ones. After all a BIOS bug affecting 10 000+ users is far more important than one that affects 1 000 users.

 

You may think that the most expensive board would at least get more hardware validation. This also isn't true. If you want the most validated hardware you should just not buy motherboards at launch. For example Gigabyte massively upgraded the memory topology between the the X570 Aorus Xtreme rev1.0 and rev1.1. You'd think a 700USD board would launch with the memory topology dialed in but that's just not true. The original version of the Maximus Z690 Apex has a hardware flaw that makes it impossible for many early production boards to boot speeds higher than DDR5-6400.

If buying the most expensive motherboard meant that you automatically get the best board I wouldn't consider you an idiot. In practice however the price of a motherboard past a certain point has no impact on how good it is and so buying the most expensive one in hopes of getting the best one makes you an idiot.