Simple, Bare-Bones Motherboards? 627
basic0 writes "After my Windows box recently lost its life in a puff of awful smelling smoke, I tracked the fault to the motherboard. Now I'm in the market for a replacement board, but all the boards I find seem to be all-in-one models with on-board everything. I already have a good graphics card, NIC, USB audio device, etc. I just need a no-frills motherboard like I used to be able to buy. It seems like a waste to buy a board with all the built-in stuff (and probably pay extra for it) when I'm never going to use it. Has anyone else had similar experiences? Do a lot of people actually use the on-board stuff? Is it still possible to purchase a motherboard that's *just* a motherboard?"
You'll end up paying more (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as you arent addicted to sucky x86, YES ! (Score:1, Interesting)
good few-frills motherboard. only unneccessary whistle is onboard audio. Unless you consider USB a frill...
-GenTimJS
Re:pricewatch (Score:1, Interesting)
He might also look at www.froogle.com. Pretty fucking amazing how a search engine can find things. These new fangled internet 'sites' are great.
Re:You'll end up paying more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You'll end up paying more (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt there's much price difference anyway. The reason why mobos have on board lan, for example, is they can add it really cheaply.
Frankly, I wouldn't want a mobo without the frills. Integrated Nic is nice. On-board sounds means there's a backup. On board video, provided you still have an AGP port, can also be used as a backup. When the machine's retired, it can easily be given to somebody else.
Onboard not that bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Extra features? So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
The mobo market is intensely competative. So for $120 you can something loaded! How much cheaper do you expect your mobo to get? The mobo is the sacred heart of you machine! Get a good one. If you already have a sound or ethernet card, run 2 interfaces! Its all in good fun! The Linux kernel will surprise you with what it can do. Whats wrong with having 10 USB's? SATA RAID? Muliple DVD's? Get an ASUS, MSI, Abit, Soltec, DFI, AOpen, Chaintech, Gigabyte, Foxconn, Epox ... They're all good. Get something that looks good through your side panel. Get cool cables. What no glass side panel, no LED's? You have a modest machine indeed.
Re:As long as you arent addicted to sucky x86, YES (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Sun bigot with a lot of Sun hardware in my house (all free, fortunately). But their outrageous prices have always been one of my hatreds for them, and I doubt that this motherboard is any different. Considering that they don't even list a price (even under "Price and Buy"), that makes me even more worried about the cost.
The SX1500 and SX2500 might be barebone motherboards, but that one Sun motherboard + UltraSPARC module could probably buy four or five decent AMD CPU + MB combinations.
A good reason to buy a no frills MB (Score:5, Interesting)
For example... my case is an HP Vectra desktop with that Asus a7v333 motherboard. I'm odd I know. In order to get the provided plate to fit properly I'd need to cut the hole larger by about 10cm or so. Further, the audio jacks extend above the size of the hole making the top jack unuseable.
Re:What you complaining about? (Score:1, Interesting)
Side note:
Don't overclock a cheap video card using only the factory cooling solution.
Re:How about better components? (Score:3, Interesting)
How much do you actually think you spend for the stuff you disable? If you think about it, you'll realize that the marginal cost of that stuff on the board must really be quite small: OEMs care about differences of a few cents, plus or minus. In some cases, in fact, it would cost money to take the functionality off the board: if the "net card" is part of a multifunction gate array chip, then it will be cheaper per unit, overall to make twice as many with the extra funtionality than it would be to make one unit of each, one with the functionality and the other without.
(If you think I just implied that the system is cheaper with the net functionality than it would be if it would be without it, you're right. The wonders of mass production, eh?)
You aren't going to get very much for the few scraps of extra silicon.
Re:Check out Google's WHOIS info (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, my whois is now responding with a message saying VeriSign's whois server is down - maybe they're trying to fix it, or it's been flooded with requests from curious
Re:What you complaining about? (Score:4, Interesting)
NVIDIA's SoundStorm, for example, is excellent and compares well with discrete solutions.
VIA's "Vinyl" audio is also quite good.
There's also an onboard Creative Labs chip that's excellent.
Big-name computers and motherboards (Score:5, Interesting)
I have one HP machine (no, I'm not stupid enough to pay money for one--my parents gave it to me when they got a new one), that has an Asus P4B266 motherboard inside it. It's currently in my closet being used as a server, and I have to say that the board's not bad...
Another old HP machine that used to belong to my parents (which is currently sitting half-dismantled on my bed) also has an Asus board--specifically, a P2B-VE (hey, I said it was an old machine).
There's one site that has a list of what motherboards come with what HP machines [elhvb.com]. A very large amount of them have Asus boards, and there are also quite a few machines that have MSI boards.
Contrast this with Dell. Dell not only makes their own boards, but they use all sorts of proprietary form factors. A friend of mine, who has a shitty Dell PC, wanted to install a new hard drive. His machine has only one internal 3.5" bay and one external 3.5" bay (taken up by the original hard drive and floppy drive, respectively), so he decided to remove the floppy drive to put the new hard drive in. It turns out that Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement. Yes, I said proprietary screw arrangement of all things. No storebought drive will fit into that machine's drive bays because of that. To hell with Dell. Also, we found out that Dell uses some kind of oddball heatsink/fan--it actually attaches to the case and funnels air through holes in the case. It's like a CPU fan and case fan in one device. Freaky.
As I said above, I hate HP, but I at least have some respect for them. I have no respect for Dell whatsoever.
Re:What you complaining about? (Score:3, Interesting)
Add to that the fact that ATI's RS480 chipset includes X300 equivalent graphics, and it seems pretty silly to say 'onboard video sucks.' The X300's not a screamer by any means, but onboard video that'll run Far Cry at an acceptable framerate is fine by me.
Re:You'll end up paying more (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, except for that on the hardware side there are several roughly equal competitors, while while the software side is essentially a monopoly.
But yeah, other than that, it's exactly the same!
PCI obsolete? Not yet (Score:3, Interesting)
PCI-Express will replace PCI one day, but it will be a long time before PCI-Express is even a viable alternative for anything except video cards. Even in the mid-late 90s, when ISA was still around, there were plenty of PCI cards. Now, no one uses Serial and Parallel ports, and USB devices are all oer the place, but you still see Serial and Parallel ports on most boards. PCI Express is still in its infancy--PCI ain't gonna be obsolete for a long time. AGP, on the other hand, will die very soon, as the only area in which PCI Express has made progress is video cards.
Re:Cheapness (Score:3, Interesting)
Although it's not so much the selling, it's that it would cost them more to *develop* two products. As FSB, memory and CPU speeds have exploded, the margin of error for motherboards has decreased accordingly. Even tiny changes to the physical layout of a motherboard can make the difference between a rock-solid stable machine and one that crashes every 10 seconds. Lots of QA goes into testing board designs thoroughly. It's easier to simply drop all the ridiculously cheap, commonly used components (LAN and Audio definitely) onto the board right from the get-go, and as a bonus they only have to develop one BIOS setup, one manual, one box, and one set of drivers. And yes, they really are ridiculously cheap.. I assure you that when you buy a $10 PCI ethernet card, you are paying much more for the packaging than you are for the ethernet chip, for example.
Quite simply, it's not worth the hassle. And it's not worth saving the theoretical $10 either. If you ever end up needing a backup ethernet port, or want to use it as a hardware firewall, you'll appreciate little things like having onboard video and ethernet.
mass market economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really.
The fallacy is that these extra peripherals cost extra. They don't, really. The price you pay is determined by, more than any other factor, the economy of mass producing exactly the same product for such a large market.
Especially in the chipset, those extra transistors come almost for free. It would cost MORE to make another version of the chips with a different configuration. Likewise, even with the same chips, it would cost MORE to make additional models without the extra connectors. There is tremendous savings in manufacturing only one model (or relatively few). Distribution and retail sales also saves costs only having to deal with fewer distinct models.
So just don't use those extra bell and whistles. But don't imagine they're costing you anything extra. The PC motherboard market is extremely competitive, and many companies and individuals shop primarily for the lowest price. If there was an easy way, such as making a different model without some parts, to achieve a lower price, you better believe the manufacturers would do it in a heartbeat.
And there are plenty of budget motherboards. If they could save even a small amount taking off more features, they certainly would. Because they haven't, you can have high confidence those extras aren't actually costing you anything extra.... in the reality of today's manufacturing, distribution and retail marketplace.
Re:You'll end up paying more (Score:5, Interesting)
To have a chipset being accepted by the motherboard manufacturers, it has to come with easy implementable reference designs and with a small board real estate, that is: a minimum of used area for the chips itself and for the connections to other functions. So chip sets tend to integrate as many functions as possible, because thus board manufactures need less additional circuits and wiring to put those functions at the boards. A large portion of the boards in turn are sold to assemblers anyway, which are keen on boards with many functions already builtin, because then they don't need to put additional cards and ports into the boxes they are assembling.
So for a board manufacturer to get into the assembler business to sell boards he has to offer fully integrated boards, and he will choose fully integrated chipsets to deliver.
And if he has once designed fully integrated board series, what's the point in designing stripped down versions again? He will use the same chipsets anyway, because he has all the testing equipment in place for those, he reuses the design of the wiring (once the masks for wiring are done, the manufactunging costs are the same, independent of the number of wires), so all he saves are the few cents for the actual sockets and the soldering of the sockets to the boards.
Basicly a "bare" board then is nothing else than a board without the sockets, but electrically the functions are there. But to manufacture those boards intentionally you need another production process, another QA process, another packaging. It might be cheaper to just sort the boards according to their final testing results and then specify which functions are 'there' (those that work in the tests).
Re:then dont use it (Score:3, Interesting)
Also since most people here noticed I said most not all. I know serial is still used by some, and at work we have 3 parralell printers dot matrix printers. but personally I haven't owned a dot-matrix in 10 years. My only serial toy is my UPS. everything else is USB.
I noticed this when shopping for mini-itx boards. there is a total of two models without all the other connectors. If I am trying to make a cool small shape, why do I have to ruin it by cutting out such a huge block at once?
Re:then dont use it (Score:3, Interesting)
I disabled several video cards and sound cards via my motherboard over the years guess what.
Windows installs drivers for them anyway and reactivates them.
I spent an hour one day trying to figure out what was wrong with win 2k, I finally plugged my network cable into the on board jack and things worked for a minute. Windows had reactivated the barely functioning built-in jack (not sure why but it wouldn't hold a connection)
Windows Plug and play does more than just ask the bios for hardware specs, it does a deep hardware scan sometimes.
Re:More importantly... (Score:3, Interesting)
CPU time than an SB LIve! or Audigy 1. It's right on par with
Audigy 2 in that respect, which was mentioned a lot on techsites
back when NForce 2 was new. Since the sound seems to be using some
Intel 8xx derivative driver under Linux, I wouldn't be surprised
if the 915G chipsets have something similar.
You can get 5.1 sound from an onboard chipset through reversal of
one of the inputs, but EAX 4.0 support is probably not going to work.
Onboard graphics steal RAM from the total system memory, but if
you're going to use it in a server, you can adjust it down to use
just a couple of megs of it. Linux nd BSD isn't picky when you're
in text mode
The major chipsets nowadays also use 3Com, NVidia and Intel NICs
built-in. Only the NVidia has been problematic for me (and I'll
whine for hours about that on a bad day), but for some reason,
NVidia's deluxe sets with two NICs have 3Com+their own NIC. You're
bound to get at least one working, and they come in gigabit flavours
Re:More importantly... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen this argument put forward for buying macs (and it's pretty much won me over). PCs no longer have an upgrade path... New MB, new chip, new power supply, new RAM to match the bus speed, new SATA disks with the new MB... My oldest components are my kb and monitor (~9 years old, It's been worth the mad coin i spent on it at the time!). I don't think the kb will ever die but the monitor is getting ready to retire (and has been for three years now...)
I agree for different reasons... Think green! (Score:3, Interesting)
These days, with all the ports on the mobo, we throw away an extra pound of plastic every time we change chips. This stuff seldom changes -- the ATX port cluster still includes a parallel port, PS/2 ports, and USB ports like when it was introduced. How much of this stuff is sitting in a landfill now?
I'd like to see most of that integrated with the case. Like the front-mounted USB and audio ports, why not put an actual USB hub and USB audio device, along with USB serial and parallel devices, perhaps a USB ethernet adapter, on a PCB inside the case? Let it connect to a single motherboard USB header.
This would give case designers the ultimate flexibility in putting the ports where they want, since a lot of casemodding these days seems to involve port rearrangement. It would liberate the mobo designers from having to mount and support all that plastic, which would in turn allow motherboards to be smaller for those who don't need all those ports. And, for those of us who don't care to have it integrated into the case, we could stick our port cards or port bays into whatever slot or drive mountings we chose.
Re:Big-name computers and motherboards (Score:4, Interesting)