Remember when life was simpler? When there were only a few kinds of coffee? When the lower orders knew their place? And when a USB port was just a bloody USB port? Well, wake up and smell the bandwidth because things have become an awful lot more complicated. Enter the Asus Z170-A and its plethora of USB ports.Part of the problem is avoidable and entirely the fault of motherboard makers. You see, they've taken to dressing up the USB 3.0 5Mb/s standard as USB 3.1 gen1, at the same time as calling what used to be USB 3.1 10Mb/s, USB 3.1 gen2. It's all baffling and making a bad situation worse.Check out the rear panel on the new Asus Z170-A. It packs no fewer than three different types of USB ports. You've got your common or garden USB 2.0 ports. Then there's some USB 3.0 ports (or USB 3.1 gen1 ports if you're a silly mobo maker) and a lone USB 3.1 socket. Rounding it out is the real newbie, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, which is much smaller than a standard Type-A port and reversible, which means you can just stuff the connector in and it'll work, like Apple's Lightning connector.DesignOf course, that USB complexity applies to all of the Z170 boards we've seen. So what marks out Asus's Z170-A? Not its build quality, that's for sure.