Socket 370 and Socket A were very easy to break. You needed a flat head screwdriver to pry off the metal bracket which held the cooler in place. Apply a little too much force (or just repeat the process a few times) and watch the plastic nook break off of the socket, rendering the entire mainboard useless. Zip-ties or super glue might save you, if just for a while. But good luck moving/transporting the computer then.
I always did appreciate the 'nicer' heatsinks that spent the extra bit of cost of materials/machining/etc to provide a proper, safe 'slot' for the screwdriver.
That said, my Socket A system that would move around alot between home/work/school... After the horrors I had seen at work and a particularly unlucky guy at college [0] I made sure that the board I got had the 4 hole setup option (GA-7DXR, awesome board except for the capacitor plague being a thing), and managed to get Alpha Novatech to sell me a discounted (for evaluation) PAL8045 cooler.
For it's era, probably the most durable setup you could have for a Socket A, even though we didn't have Case mounting holes for thermal solutions yet. It also didn't have the torquing risks you would occasionally see on the P4's cam lever setup with cheaper boards.
[0] - Guy tried installing a fancy dragon orb cooler, ground a corner off the CPU, the CPU became a board killer. (I still don't know why he tried another board after seeing the damage...)
I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.
I remember seeing in a Popular Electronics Magazine, in the late 60s or early 70s, stating "There will never be a Blue LED". Despite looking I've not found that issue again.
I generally agree. But then again, we had Master/Slave IDE connectors, floppy drives, _extremely_ shitty CPU sockets (broke plenty of Sockel A / 370 cooler latches), nothing (including keyboards and mice!) was hot-pluggable ...
Regarding your last point: that's just market segmentation. Plenty of lanes on server CPUs. Remember Linus' rant about Intels refusal to offer ECC for consumer CPUs?
I did the exact opposite. And by that I mean physically moved my homelab into their colo earlier this year. Runs like a charm, costs about 500€ per month total.
Sounds like a lot, but I was almost paying the same before - 220€ for power at home, 110€ for a dedicated Hetzner server, 95€ for a secondary internet connection (as not to interfere with the main uplink used for home office by my partner and me).
Not having to deal with the extra heat, noise and used up space at home anymore has been worth it as well.
My storage needs were increasing by the day. Electricity is now a small monthly cost. I have more cores and ram than ever, and can easily expand it. Main machine now runs with 1TB ram and 15TB SSD and other has more than 384G ram. I currently use 3TB ssd storage, and get way more performnce than Hetzner's VMs with ceph ssd disks. I do need redundancy, but it's not something hetzner was giving me anyway, and if my anectode is not a mess up, i actually got database corruption on hetzner that never happened on my own local setup.
I'd have colo'ed or used dedicated as it's definitely better than their VMs, but they don't have that in their US datacenters.
I am pretty happy with my current setup, I have significantly less down time (few mins a month) than when I was on hetzner - but this is mostly due to my need for more ram at times.
I also used this as an excuse to get 56G mellanox fiber switch and get poe cameras etc in a full homelab manner, so it's been fun, on top of being cheaper. Noise is not a concern, I got a sound-proof server rack that's pretty nice. It takes up space, but i have kids, so my garage is near full at times anyways :)
