New
#51
You couldn't.
Unless you had an intimate knowledge of the board manufacturer's design, procurement, and manufacturing processes. Which you don't and can't.
It's mostly marketing babble to induce you to spend more money than necessary. The same tactics are used across most industries. You would rather have "military grade" yada yada than mere "civilian grade" yada yada, wouldn't you? 10 of something is surely better than 7, am I right? You did buy that 200 watt stereo rather than that 140 watt stereo, didn't you?
And on and on. The profit margin on a $300 board is much much higher than on a $170 board.
The degree of babble has increased in the last 5 or 10 years as the manufacturers face a declining PC market, particularly in the do-it-yourself segment and are straining to differentiate themselves from each other to maintain market share. That's also why you see garish color schemes and "features" that are purely stylistic, with no function at all--despite the babble. If the tactic didn't work, it would have been abandoned.
Ideally, you'd like to find more plain-speaking hard-boiled reviews that separate the wheat from the chaff, particularly as regards long-term reliability, but that's expensive to implement and would incur the wrath of manufacturers and put the reviewer on a s*** list, never to receive more free samples. So, you get more of the same, one hand washing the other and everybody's happy. Except the consumer.