Motherboard Selection Help

[Frosty_47]

In today's world of redundancy ( I don't mean just programing) industry attempts to satisfy everyone. This often results in overcomplicated products that cost more money and poor performance. I am looking for an AM2/AM3 motherboard that does not come with integrated crap such as:

-Floppy Drive Controller + Port (Who the **** still uses floppy ?)
-IDE Controller + Port (99% of all HDD are SATA now)
-On board Video (no comment on that one)
-On board Sound (Great if your deaf)
-Serial Port ( WTF? Are they serious?!)
-Parallel Port (same comment as above)
-Five PCI Slots ( I just need one for my sound card)
-Four PCI-E slots (Like I can afford to put in 4 video cards)
-PS2 Ports for Insanely old Keyboard and mouse
-Infinite number of SATA Ports ( I only need TWO!)
-RAID Controller (Unless your running a Server, there is no need for it)

I understand that most of the above features can be disabled in BIOS. I however do not understand why I would be paying more money for useless stupid features that I do not use. Not only are they useless and cost me more money, they also complicate board design which degrades the overall performance. This is unforgiving. With intense competition out there, there must be at least one company that should realize the need for a simpler product.

 

[Sceadwian]

Frosty, they don't sell a motherboard to a single customer that wants only the features they use that's totally impossible, they sell to the masses, it HAS to be the masses your you'd pay 10 times the price becaues of production costs. You don't seem to understand the economy of scale. It's actually cheaper to produce boards with all this other crap on it rather than a dozen boards with various mixed peripherals for specific purposes.

You're actually paying signifcantly less money than you would be for a board that didn't have all the features you didn't want, simply because it's cheaper to make them in bulk under a giant umbrulla stamp that has the features that 99.9% of all users could possibly want. Catering to even a 1% market can sink an entire product line. What is unforgiving is that you think the world should fit your perception of it, it'd be far more forgiving of you to understand why things are the way they are now.

Do you really think these multi billion dollars companies haven't worked the numbers on all this stuff to try to maximize product price vs cost and do so on a daily basis?

 

[Frosty_47]

Frosty, they don't sell a motherboard to a single customer that wants only the features they use that's totally impossible, they sell to the masses, it HAS to be the masses your you'd pay 10 times the price becaues of production costs. You don't seem to understand the economy of scale. It's actually cheaper to produce boards with all this other crap on it rather than a dozen boards with various mixed peripherals for specific purposes.

You're actually paying signifcantly less money than you would be for a board that didn't have all the features you didn't want, simply because it's cheaper to make them in bulk under a giant umbrulla stamp that has the features that 99.9% of all users could possibly want. Catering to even a 1% market can sink an entire product line. What is unforgiving is that you think the world should fit your perception of it, it'd be far more forgiving of you to understand why things are the way they are now.

Do you really think these multi billion dollars companies haven't worked the numbers on all this stuff to try to maximize product price vs cost and do so on a daily basis?

Yes it is clear to me that it would seem cheaper to produce one kind of board by the million. However that's not my only argument here. I don't see how an average user would need the above mentioned features. You cannot satisfy everyone in this world, that's why there is something called choice. Non the less I am certain that I am not the only one seeking a product like that. Perhaps having no on board sound is a problem for a lot of user. Its 2010 god damn it, how long more will it take for these manufactures to realize that most of computer users in the world can live without floppy drives, parallel/serial ports, and IDE devices.

 

[Sceadwian]

99% of all current HD's are SATA, maybe.... 99% of all current HDs are not 99% of the entire HD market past present and future dependant, there are still hundreds of millions of IDE drives out there, backwards compatibility is key to adoption of new hardware. Floppy drives... well I hear that, but the IC space required for floppy support is so small it's trivial. I am mildly amazed they still waste the board space for the traces and connectors. But this is exceedingly less common.

As far as parallel and serial ports go? Sorry, dead wrong, they're still commonly used for HUGE portions of buisness and industrial hardware, the only reason why they're coming off of motherboards in general is because there are still external I/O solutions for them as far as USB goes.

Video and sound? Every PC chip maker nowdays is pushing their video and audio solutions.. It's marketing all the way.

PCI slots? Again, there are technologies the should be supported, although 1 slot only would be good =)

PCI-E slots? Depends, Very few come with higher speed slots, most of them come with extra 1 or 8x slots.

 

[cr0sh]

Personally, I wish they would make a board that had -all- of those things (maybe they do - but its probably waaay out of my price range). Heck, I wish they still made a board with EISA slots (just a tad bit easier to prototype with - plus I have a ton of 8255 PIAs I need to do something with!). I know it is "just me" though; most people don't want or need a lot of that stuff, but I have a ton of legacy hardware that I want to keep supporting and using. That's generally why I keep a bunch of old motherboards around (still kicking myself for letting go of a sweet 386 mobo I had at one time)...

 

[Frosty_47]

Personally, I wish they would make a board that had -all- of those things (maybe they do - but its probably waaay out of my price range). Heck, I wish they still made a board with EISA slots (just a tad bit easier to prototype with - plus I have a ton of 8255 PIAs I need to do something with!). I know it is "just me" though; most people don't want or need a lot of that stuff, but I have a ton of legacy hardware that I want to keep supporting and using. That's generally why I keep a bunch of old motherboards around (still kicking myself for letting go of a sweet 386 mobo I had at one time)...

Hey I Know what you feel. I still have a socket 462 system that I love. If anything, Legacy kicks ass, I never had problems with IDE etc, but since the support for legacy systems was abandoned, I see no reason as to why they would be included in todays motherboards.

 

[littletransistor]

I don't see an issue with putting legacy stuff or an excess of SATA and PCI ports. You know, nothing is just too much in computing world.

I have four SATA ports inside my motherboard, but 3 of them are already occupied. I didn't even predict that when I bought it in 2007!

 

[cr0sh]

What might be nice is if they went back to a standard backplane system; blade servers are close to this, in a way. That way, you could slot in whatever you wanted, and you could potentially keep the same case and power supply for a longer period of time...

 

[Sceadwian]

PC's have been using standard backplanes for years, it's called a PCI bus =)
PCI express isn't going anywhere anytime soon, X1 PC Express slots only have 36 pins and all of them aren't required for the interface. Pretty much every piece of hardware you can get for PCI busses have now been ported to PCI-express

I'm not sure why you would want a blackplane system like blade servers use it's totally non practical for a PC system.

 

[cr0sh]

I'm not sure why you would want a blackplane system like blade servers use it's totally non practical for a PC system.

I don't think so; while I can foresee that there could be certain issues with a backplane, the possibilities that could be opened up would likely outweigh them. For instance, you could have a backplane with say, 16 slots. You could buy processor cards; each with a quad core cpu and a gig of RAM. One for each of 15 slots, with the final slot being an I/O card (ethernet and USB, perhaps). You would now have a 60 core machine; what could you do with such a system?

Or, maybe that isn't your need? Maybe you fill four of the slots with shared video cards, one slot with I/O, and the rest with CPU cards (same as above) - one heck of a graphics workstation, VR/AR rig, gaming system...

Or - perhaps you could purchase CPU cards with actual older CPUs, or systems - each one acting as an emulator?

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Having a backplane would allow you to build your system -exactly- how you wanted it; should a new CPU come out, you could swap the boards, or add the board in, leaving your old CPU in place if you wish (so you don't lose the investment). If you needed a super-powerful multi-CPU workstation, no problem; if you just wanted one CPU card, an I/O card, and a video card - no problem. Maybe next year you could add another CPU, or a second (and third, and fourth...) video card as your needs changed.

Right now, if you want to do that, your options are more limited; in many cases, if you want a more powerful CPU (or more RAM, etc), and you have reached the limit of your motherboard - you need to buy a new motherboard. In many cases, unless you are upgrading every 6 months to year, if you need a new motherboard you have to "scrap" the RAM and the CPU, wasting that money and processing power (for instance, I once had my motherboard die on me; the CPU and RAM I had were adequate, but since I had them for so long, I was forced to spend more money than I wanted to just to replace that board, because I couldn't find a new one that would support my aged CPU and RAM - what could've been a $100.00 purchase, bloomed into a >$300.00 purchase quickly).

 

[Sceadwian]

It would be incredibly difficult if not physically impossible to run processors or modern high speed memories on a backplane like that, modern chips are too fast the trace requirements are too strict, the simple addition of a physical connector slot would cause the devices to be limited in performance, why do you think the Intels lame slot based processors failed so utterly? A year after the first slot based motherboards came out the processors were already too fast to be run on them the trace parasitic of the physical connector crippled the processor.

Modern software BARELY even take advantage of dual core processors, there is no practical public use for a 60 core machine. You definitely came up with a few possible uses for such a deisgn, not one of which can't be already done with existing boards. There are quad processor based boards that support quad cored intel hyperthreaded chips, for an effective possibility of 64 running threads, totally useless, especially if they need to access system memory as the whole thing comes to a screaming halt when an external bus needs to be used.

Personally I always buy the most state of the art (within reason) motherboard that I can, regardless of price, the top of the line motherboards are only a couple hundred dollars more, and my last machine was retired after 6 years and will still run every piece of software out there except modern games. Chosing the proper motherboard and looking at current and upcoming technologies and determining what is the best choice for the long term is incredibly complex. Personally it's not worth it nowdays modern PC's are so incredibly over powered right now it's nearly impossible to buy a slow computer, I bought a Dell system for my current machine simply because they've already done all the work for me.

 

[cr0sh]

It would be incredibly difficult if not physically impossible to run processors or modern high speed memories on a backplane like that, modern chips are too fast the trace requirements are too strict, the simple addition of a physical connector slot would cause the devices to be limited in performance, why do you think the Intels lame slot based processors failed so utterly? A year after the first slot based motherboards came out the processors were already too fast to be run on them the trace parasitic of the physical connector crippled the processor.

...and this is what I was alluding to when I wrote "...while I can foresee that there could be certain issues with a backplane..."

Modern software BARELY even take advantage of dual core processors, there is no practical public use for a 60 core machine.

I agree that there isn't a practical "public use" for such a system today, at least not to the level that it would make sense to manufacture such systems; the demand isn't there (however, there is a small demand - else why would you see the development of DIY Beowulf clusters and other cluster computing systems, not to mention NVIDIA's Tesla Personal Supercomputer).

You definitely came up with a few possible uses for such a deisgn, not one of which can't be already done with existing boards. There are quad processor based boards that support quad cored intel hyperthreaded chips, for an effective possibility of 64 running threads, totally useless, especially if they need to access system memory as the whole thing comes to a screaming halt when an external bus needs to be used.

Which is why I mentioned incorporating some memory on board each CPU card; I am certain that these issues could all be overcome with proper design - right now, as you mentioned, though - there just isn't a need in the market for a system that has the ability to incorporate such a level of power.

Personally I always buy the most state of the art (within reason) motherboard that I can, regardless of price, the top of the line motherboards are only a couple hundred dollars more, and my last machine was retired after 6 years and will still run every piece of software out there except modern games. Chosing the proper motherboard and looking at current and upcoming technologies and determining what is the best choice for the long term is incredibly complex. Personally it's not worth it nowdays modern PC's are so incredibly over powered right now it's nearly impossible to buy a slow computer, I bought a Dell system for my current machine simply because they've already done all the work for me.

I personally think that systems like NVIDIA's Tesla machine will eventually become common on desktops, barring some other great advance in CPU or machine/system architecture; in a way, it represents the ultimate of what can be done with a desktop system (and for the money, it sure is cheap)...

 

[Sceadwian]

Crosh, complete electrical impossibility isn't an issue, it's the reason why what you're talking about doesn't exist, it can't.

Those clusters you're talking about use ultra high speed network transport protocols instead of the traditional traced PC connections for processor communication, and even those have to be HIGHLY optimized to use local cache memory optimally to utilize full CPU performance, they're also useful in very limited HIGHLY application specific environments, they basically have to be custom designed for the application.

The PS3 is the most advanced multi core (less current high end PCs) machine in current existence in the consumer market that I'm aware of. I think you're highly mistaken about such systems taking over the Desktop market, in the next 10 years the Desktop market will probably no longer exist, definitely not in it's current state that's for sure, it's all moving to highly functional network enabled tablets and portable devices and 'cloud computing' Simply put, massive computing power is no longer an issue, we're way past what we can currently use efficiently in consumer products, and it's only interesting in passing for super computing networks as they have no practical uses in a desktop environment. I've seen the Nvidia Tesla before, they're aiming at a market that doesn't currently exist. The possibility of the hardware is MOOT if it doesn't have an application.

 

[BrownOut]

...and this is what I was alluding to when I wrote "...while I can foresee that there could be certain issues with a backplane..."

Don't dispare, modern connection technology, combined with SerDes technology and streamlined protocols enable backplane throughputs of 5GBS per lane ( or better ) The technology is there to enable your backplane system

 

[BrownOut]

cr0sh, I've thought of a solution for you. Forget backplane, use Gigabit Ethernet, and just cable your boards. GigE has performance that approaches PCI-33. Make one card a router ( just rip the board out of a commercial unit and install in your cage ) Layout each board identically with a RISC microcontroller and just use free ware to enable each function. Lay out connectors for every type of interface on the board, and then just populate whichever one is necessary. Enable Wake on Lan for power management. You'll probably want to run Linux server OS on the master processor. It may be a little primitive, but it's a start. Heck, it solves the original problem of not getting a motherboard with the desired features. Maybe you'll inspire a new generation of developers, and you'll be as famous as Linus Torvalds.