The main point of my question is about the shelf life of a motherboard, which has already been answered by a lot of people. Thanks all for clarifying that.

As for the mini motherboards, I am not storing them just for the sake of storing them. A motherboard collection would actually be pretty nice, but I am putting them on the shelf simply because I do not have the money to turn them into proper machines.

The FM2+ socket is still quite young, so I think the board has a healthy future. As for the scenario that the peripherals becomes unusable via damage or lack of driver support, well the board have enough USB ports to add in adapters. I can replace most of the parts with USB versions such as USB audio cards, USB SSD drive, USB Ethernet, and etc.

 

..... always supposing that USB is still around in 10 years' time .

 

Anyone remember parallel port, serial port, Vesa, AGP, PCI, IEEE1394, IEEE1184, IEEE1194, E-SATA, standards and many more ?

 

Although the new USB3 ASUS 2012 AMD boards I picked up recently have on board connectors for COM & Parallel ports if needed.
Max.