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Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports 673

Posted by timothy from the but-only-the-newfangled-ports dept.
An enthusiastic reader submits: "Possibly the most innovative motherboard to be released in years, Abit's MAX series intends to dive headfirst into the next generation of computing, leaving legacy ports behind in their dust. Hardcoreware.net has the first full review of this board, which has support for 10 USB devices and 12 (YES, 12) IDE devices." I wish it had even more built-in USB ports, but six is a good start.
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Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports More

Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports

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  • Funny.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by z84976 ( 64186 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:01PM (#3326360) Homepage
    And after all these years, i'm just NOW finally finding a need for more than the standard two serial ports! (x10 controller, ups, smartcard device, etc)

    • Re:Funny.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmPz ( 572913 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:10PM (#3326737)
      A PC without RS232 ?! Now, the RS232 is probably the industrys most common interface. It's clean, it's simple, it's fast (using proper interrupts, compared to USB style). They claim that this board is aimed at the geek market. Ok... Let me ask one thing... the USB interface, is it amined at the geek market? Noo, it's supposed to simlify things for non geeks. Geeks work closer to the research at university's and the industry. You wount find USB in either places. Geeks use real ports, like the RS232, RS485 (a great multidrop interface that supports up to 10Mbit and 1km long wires!, and is as cheap and simple as RS232, but sadly enough it is only used in the industry) I consider myself fairly geeky, I'am a hardware designer and embedded software programmer. Ths USB is a insanely complex interface software wise, it consumes lot's of CPU power since it lacks DMA support (everything except USB and the floppy has DMA theese days), and it sucks at realtime applications (anyone with a USB mouse knows that). I don't want this board. And I'd advise anyone against buying it, since it lacks proper ports. The only ones that might want this board are OEM's (everything integrated, and only USB ports so that stupid users don't get confused by all the ports) Oh... Yes... There is another niche.. It might get the warez server market because of all the IDE chanels.

      • Re:Funny.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by z84976 ( 64186 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:38PM (#3326858) Homepage
        Here's the kicker.... with $5 worth of parts from Radio Shack and an afternoon's ingenuity (even for a non-programming geek), you can still do something USEFUL with rs232c. Gotta love it. Try that with USB.

        • Re:Funny.... (Score:3, Informative)

          by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
          Why not just get a "USB TO SERIAL CONVERTER DB25M", its even supported under linux. I wanted to do this for a bbs, but the price per unit 45 bux was a little expensive.

          • Re:Funny.... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Paul Komarek ( 794 )
            Why not? Let's repeat your parent post, but with your suggestion added:

            "Here's the kicker.... with $5 worth of parts from Radio Shack, a $45 converter for each serial port you need, and an afternoon's ingenuity (even for a non-programming geek), you can still do something USEFUL with rs232c. Gotta love it. Try that with USB"

            I don't want to spend $150 or whatever on a motherboard, and then spend another $50 for basic functionality. I'm sure Abit knows their target market, and I'm sure I'm not in it.

            -Paul

      • USB absolutely uses DMA (Score:5, Informative)

        by Johannes ( 33283 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:46PM (#3326893)
        I don't know where you're getting your information, but all 3 common USB host controllers (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI) use bus mastering DMA to transfer the data from the device to main memory.

        Go check the USB host controller specs [usb.org] for yourself.

  • Wow! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 )
    With 12 IDE ports, it has nearly as much capacity as my 2-channel SCSI card!

    Hope you enjoy IRQ-sharing...

    - A.P.

  • Sweet! (Score:3, Funny)

    by theVitViper ( 572365 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:03PM (#3326370)
    Now I don't need all 5 of those Promise ATA contollers I've got!
  • Here's the first page: The Next Generation of motherboards...?

    Never has the announcement of a motherboard created as much buzz around the PC hardware enthusiast community as the Abit "MAX" series of motherboards (something tells me they really wanted to call it "Matrix" instead). This line of boards, available on both Athlon and Pentium 4 platforms, is Abit's attempt at taking motherboards one step into the next generation, leaving things like legacy ports in its dust.


    Windows 2000/XP/ME only. Win98 users need not apply.

    How significant is this step though? If you've been paying attention to the hype surrounding these boards, you might think that it is a giant leap for motherboard kind. We're going to find out if this is the case, or if the MAX series is rather a baby step.

    Giant leap or baby step, one thing is for certain, the AT7, Abit's first board in the MAX lineup, is definitely one of the most unique boards you'll see today. The AT7 uses the newest, fastest chipset for the Athlon platform, VIA's KT333. KT333 supports most of the newest features you'll need, such as native ATA/133 hard drives, onboard 5.1 audio with digital output, support for DDR333 SDRAM, and more. Abit takes that one step further, and adds a ton of integrated components intended for the next generation of computing. This includes both FireWire AND USB2.0 controller, a 4 channel ATA/133 RAID adapter (making for an unprecedented support of 10 ATA drives onboard), onboard 10/100 LAN, and MediaXP support. These would all be excellent useful addons for most boards, but that's where the MAX series is different - these aren't just addons for the motherboard, they actually replace all legacy parts on the board. Have a look!

    This is definitely the most unique ATX rear panel I've ever seen on a consumer board. Notice the complete lack of legacy ports - this includes PS/2, ATA, serial, parallel, the whole shebang! Instead, we get 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a pair of IEEE1394 FireWire ports, full analog 5.1 audio out, digital audio out, and a LAN connector. This is what really sets the MAX boards apart. It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old Dexxa ball mouse that came with your first SVGA card. While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off! Abit steps into a new era of computing with the MAX boards

    There are some other noticeable differences in the board layout. First off, you are only going to get 3 PCI slots. This is because most of the peripherals that would use a PCI slot, such as the Ethernet adapter and sound card, are already onboard. Personally I've never used more than 3 PCI slots, and with this board, not a single slot it used. Yep, 3 should definitely be enough.

    Despite having all the next-gen high performance capabilities, SCSI is still absent. This proves that while the AT7 is a very high end board, it is still targeted to the consumer market. Thanks, Abit!

    • [Page 2 is also pretty interesting ... then it delves into BIOS screen shots and benchmarks]
      .
      .
      .

      Got Storage?

      Have a look at the vast number of ATA connectors - 6 channels! The yellow connectors are for the Highpoint ATA/133 RAID controller (which works perfectly fine in non-RAID mode). The two higher up on the board are the natively controlled IDE channels, also supporting ATA/133. This makes for an amazing 12 possible drives without the use of a single PCI slot!

      Below the RAID channels you'll see a floppy adapter, one of the lingering legacy ports still found on this generation of MAX boards... I personally don't use a floppy drive anymore, but it will be necessary to use a floppy if you plan on installing Windows XP on a drive controlled by the Highpoint IDE. How ironic!

      Besides what I've mentioned, and the fact that there are 4 RAM slots (up to three 1GB sticks may be used at a time with non-registered RAM, four if you are using registered), the layout is pretty much standard ATX fare. There are a couple nasty layout problems though, which I'll get to later in the review.

      In addition to the 6 USB ports on the ATX rear panel (4 USB1.1 and 2 USB2.0), there are onboard connectors for 4 more USB 2.0 connectors, for a total of 10 devices! There is also an extra output for one more IEEE1394 port. The IEEE1394 controller used by the AT7 is capable of full speed 400mb/sec. So no matter what interface your advanced external peripherals are going to use, Abit definitely has you covered with the AT7.

      Once again, Abit gets unique with the AT7, this time with the bundle. Included are a set of nifty black IDE cables (3 IDE cables, 1 floppy cable). This is a great way to have some nice looking custom IDE cables without worrying about using rounded cables (IDE cables are flat for a reason you know!). Also included are a set of cable tie-downs, to aide in keeping your PC nice and tidy inside. This is a great little bundle for a motherboard! A custom ATX rear panel plate is also included of course; the one that came with your case is now officially outdated. You also get one PCI plate USB adapter, to be used on one of the USB2.0 outputs on the motherboard. I would have liked to see a pair of these, in addition to another firewire adapter, since the board supports it. Unfortunately, you're going to have to get your own this time.

      MediaXP

      One significant absence in our package (I believe Abit is going to make it an option for some retail packages) is a MediaXP panel! MediaXP is one of the great steps forward with the MAX series. Basically, it adds integrated support for various portable media, including Smart Media, Compact Flash, and even Sony's Memory Stick. MediaXP also includes headphone and microphone jacks, SPDIF ports, and 2 USB ports! It is expected that most cases will start using MediaXP panels, rather than their own Mickey Mouse panels you see now. It is already beginning to look like the MAX is taking the PC a step in the right direction...

    • There are some other noticeable differences in the board layout. First off, you are only going to get 3 PCI slots. This is because most of the peripherals that would use a PCI slot, such as the Ethernet adapter and sound card, are already onboard. Personally I've never used more than 3 PCI slots, and with this board, not a single slot it used. Yep, 3 should definitely be enough.

      Ouch. I was loving this board until I read that. I hate integrated components. If they die, or if something faster/cooler/better comes out that doesn't leave me enough slots to upgrade, so I have to replace the motherboard. Sorry Abit, you lost my business right there.

      • I hate integrated components. If they die, or if something faster/cooler/better comes out that doesn't leave me enough slots to upgrade...

        Let's say you put in an Audigy in place of on-board sound.

        And a PCI gigabit Ethernet NIC instead of the on-board 10/100.

        And a GeForce4 in the AGP 4x slot.

        You still have 10 USB ports, two firewire ports, 6 IDE headers (for 12 devices). You can put anything you want in that final PCI slot. Unless you're building a server or a videa-editing center with multiple PCI cards, you're going to be hard pressed to find a way to obsolete this board in the next 48 months.

    • yeah, and i got to page 9 of 10 before their server stopped responding :P
      just ten more seconds and i would have finished loading the last page. f*ing slashdotters :P

      anyway, here's page nine for those of you who only got to page 8. this is the "gripes"/shortcomings page. maybe someone can post pg. 10 :P

      --

      The Sound Card

      Abit chose to use VIA's next gen onboard 5.1 sound card, dubbed "Avance". It looks good on paper, being a 5.1 AC97 sound chip, with digital capabilities. Abit certainly makes use of some of the digital capabilities by putting a TOSlink Out adapter on the board, allowing you to make a digital connection to an external decoder for movies, or to a digital set of speakers. TOSlink In looks like it might be an option, but wasn't on our board.

      I have noticed that more and more board manufacturers are shying away from VIA's onboard sound as their integrated option, and going for third party options such as those by C-Media or even Creative Labs. There may be many reasons for this, and I think I may have found a few of them...

      First off, let's have a quick look at performance, using ZD's Audio WinBench 99. We are only looking at the 44 kHz tests, and only those using 32 hardware voices; basically the most demanding situations possible.

      Test A - DirectSound 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, Static, 32 Voices
      Test B - DirectSound 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, Streaming, 32 Voices
      Test C - DirectSound 3D 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, Static, 32 Voices
      Test D - DirectSound 3D 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, Streaming, 32 Voices

      Remember on this test, Lower = better. Now I am not going to go nuts and say this will give seriously hinder your performance, in fact I went through some game benchmarks with sound turned off and on, and performance differences were negligible. However it is worth noting that in the most stressful situations, the VIA onboard sound isn't quite up to the task compared to a solution like C-Media, which Shuttle has recently switched to.

      One more nasty issue I have with the sound card regards, I think, the drivers. During testing, we used a Philips MMS306 5.1 speaker set. We connected the speakers to the jacks just like on any sound card, and the sounds seemed to be coming from the wrong speakers... I used the alternate setting, using Line-In for the Centre/Woofer channel, and Line-Out for the Rear channels, and everything worked fine. It seems kind of silly that Abit ditched a parallel port to make room for some speaker outputs that are completely useless.

      The Layout

      If you have a keen eye, you might have noticed a glaring issue with the layout design of the board... I saved this for the rant page...

      That's right, the 'clip' end, where you would normally try to install the heatsink, is on the TOP of the board. When installed in a regular sized case, such as 17" or 18", it will likely be impossible to install or uninstall a heatsink - you will need to take the motherboard right out of the case if you don't have a full removable tray!

      I have seen a few boards do this before, and it always seems to be a mistake... I have no idea why Abit would consciously choose to design their board like this - it seems to go right against their usual support for the hardware community...

      If your other eye is just as keen as the first one, perhaps you noticed this:

      That's right, the memory slots are extremely close to the AGP slot, making ram installation pretty difficult with a video card installed. This is a very minor concern however, and I am not going to make much noise about this. After all, you could easily use DIMM3 and/or DIMM4 if you only have one or two stick of memory (of course even these will likely be blocked by a GeForce 4 Ti4400 or Ti4600, but then again, most memory slots will be in all likelihood). Also, most boards with 4 DIMMs tend to have this problem. It may be worth mentioning that the Shuttle AK35GTR doesn't have this problem though...

      With those rather minor gripes out of the way, let's get to the final conclusion!

    • Re:Just in case the site gets /.ed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:49PM (#3326647) Homepage Journal
      Giving up PS/2 as "legacy" is pretty much insane. There is no reasonably priced KVM switch that does BOTH USB and PS/2, and I'm not getting USB for my 486 firewall any time soon. PS/2 has PLENTY of life left in it, no matter what one mfr thinks.

  • The abit website (Score:5, Informative)

    by young-earth ( 560521 ) <slash-young-eart ... m ['oos' in gap]> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:09PM (#3326402)
    For those who are unaware, the Abit website is NOT www.abit.com; that reroutes you to motherboards.com. The site you want is www.abit-usa.com [abit-usa.com] or www.abit.com.tw [abit.com.tw]instead.
  • check out this site for some pretty pictures of abits new board http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/abit/at7/at7previe w1.htm
  • 12 * 160 GB = is almost 2 TB!!!

    And the sound of a 747 taking of comes @ no extra charge!

    • And the sound of a 747 taking of comes @ no extra charge!

      Yup, and with an Athlon and a GeForce in there too, it can double as a weenie roaster.
      • Yup, and with an Athlon and a GeForce in there too, it can double as a weenie roaster.

        It's the perfect flight simulator box! Not only are the engine sounds simulated, but the engine exhaust heat is simulated too!

  • my fav MB is still the tyan thunder K7 with onboard dual scsi ultra 160. it has all the pins for more USB if you want, and the nature of USB itselfs lets you add on as you need it... there is no need to START with 10 ports.

    as for IDE, i thought they were getting rid of legacy support?!

    this seems worthless to me. in fact, i think i'll go get another thunder K7 on pricewatch just to show abit where they should be heading.
    • They couldn't exactly get rid of IDE just yet, especially considering that there aren't any comparable consumer-level technologies available yet. Firewire is the closest, but until drives are available with actual firewire interfaces, IDE won't stand a chance of going away.

      As well, does the Thunder K7 have support for USB 2.0? Obviously, you can add a card, but having all the ports for the latest and greatest is what this MB is about. Also, for someone like me, having that many USB ports is great. It means that I don't have to buy a USB hub or any extra parts or cards or anything. Every USB device I own, 1.1 or 2.0, will have its own spot on the motherboard, instead of the nice mixture of cards and hubs I have now. More than likely, this is the board that I'll use in my next system.
  • You want more USB ports, get a USB hub, they're cheap, their easy, and they work fine. I have 2 USB ports on my computer, one is broken, I got a 4 port USB hub, so now I can plug in my printer, scanner, CF/SM card reader, and my MP3 player. If I need more ports, I'll go get another hub, or a bigger (8 port) hub. USB has been designed this way so you wouldn't need that many ports on the computer.

    More firewire ports would be better. I've never seen a firewire hub, and if they are out there, they're probably expensive.

    • I agree that this board seems to make a fetish of overkill. But you're not thinking things through when you assume that hubs are always a good substitute for ports.
      • Cables are a pain. Cutting back on them is a key USB feature. Hubs means extra cabling, especially if you have a lot of USB-powered devices, and thus need to get powered hubs.
      • Hubs share bandwidth, they don't create it. Suppose you own a half-dozen Rio Riots and want to download them all at once? (Unlikely scenario? What else would you do with a terabyte of disk space!)
      • Some storage devices don't work with shared ports. Or rather they work, but you risk scrambling them when another device grabs the port at a crucial moment.
      • There's something called "USB conflict" where the devices screw each other up because their manufacturers skimped on USB standard compliance. Usual workaround is to rearrange who shares with who -- a lot easier to do if you have more than the usual 2 ports.

  • ABIT's Media Sheet (Score:3, Informative)

    by svferris ( 519966 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:19PM (#3326482)
    Here's a link to ABIT's media sheet on the motherboard, which gives a good rundown of the new features of the board, as well as what they were thinking when designing it.

    ABIT MAX Media Sheet [abit.com.tw]

  • Terabyte system for the masses? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bravehamster ( 44836 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:21PM (#3326498) Homepage Journal
    4 Channels on an integrated RAID controller? Lets see, with 8x 120GB drives, that gives you 960GB, at less than $2000 for the entire system (assuming this board will be less than $200). Not quite a terabyte, but if you moved to 8x 160GB drives, that gives you about 1.3TB, but makes it quite a bit more expensive.


    Not that you would _want_ to put 8 drives in a RAID 0 array. The chances of failure and total data loss are just too high. But it's cool that you can.


    12 friggin' IDE channels. The mind boggles. Perhaps I can finally use up all the bays in my full-size tower. It looks mighty pathetic with just my CDRW and a floppy.

    • Thing is 4 Channels with IDE raid means 4 CHANNELS, if you put it Slave/master, even if you can stick up 8 drives, it won't go faster than it would with 4 drives as masters.

      If you are serious about buying 12 drives to make a datacenter or a half-decent raid, unless you go with old drives or buy a buttload of 20-40gigs for next to nothing, You'd probably have the budget to get a REAL raid card that does decent raid5 performance like a 3Ware 7810 (8 channels, 64 bits, 48bits LBA, all the goodies plus not limited to standard PCI 33mhz/32bits speed) And if you're a bit richer, maybe a 7850 (more cache for raid 5 performance), else there's always cheaper 6810 boards that run on a standard PCI bus, either way, it'll give you FAR better performance than this board.

      Of course, if it's to brag that your board can take 12 drives and want to connect your mom's 40megs and the brother's older 1gig drive and so on... that's another story
      • I know that having 8 drive wouldn't make it go faster than 4 drives. Speed wasn't what I was talking about, merely being able to have a single logical drive over a terabyte. Hmm...terabyte...it just rolls off the tongue. Size, not speed. Because we all know that in the end, despite what the ladies say, size does matter ;)

        • Not that you were going to rush out and set up your terabyte array, but here's a word of caution anyway. Terabyte filesystems aren't that common among Linux and FreeBSD users (which I know for sure; I'll bet NetBSD users aren't real interested, either...;-) That means they aren't well tested. Furthermore, there are limits to what is supported. For instance, the 160MB drives aren't supported in linux 2.4 yet, and filesystems have maximum sizes.

          Before anyone decides to invest heavily in a terabyte+ array thinking they'll access it as a single logical device, I recommend investing some time reading the linux kernel mailing list, or do similar reading for the OS of choice. Along with some friends, I've spent a lot of time looking at these issues lately, and there are a lot of "gotchas" for unwary users (which almost included us).

          -Paul Komarek

  • 3 PCI? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fweeky ( 41046 )
    ATM I have TV card, Sound Card, and NIC in my system; sure, this system's got on board NIC and sound, but so what? I have an SB Live that'll beat most on board stuff (well, maybe, I'm not a great fan of Live's anymore :), and needing another NIC isn't that unlikely; 3 is definately going to feel cramped.
    • I've got a SBLive also, but it's now sitting in a box. I found that the Asus KT266E (I think) has an onboard sound card that sounds just as good as the live. IANAA (I am not an audiophile) though.

      Not THAT many people need dual nic's, most just connect dirrect or to a hub or DSL router.

      I run out of slots by having: SCSII controller, two extra video cards (three monitors).

      So yeah, even if they just added one more it would probably be nice, there's always more stuff to plug in that's cool :)

    • The system's also got optical outputs, so while it won't work for 3d-sound-enabled games, it'll do for just about anything else. It may not be an extigy, but it's not going to kill you to shelve the SB Live if you need the PCI slot. So you could get by with two PCI slots, if you had USB 2.0 and Firewire, couldn't you?
      I've got an Abit NV7-133R sitting in the box that comes with what is probably the same audio setup they talk about, sitting here by my desk. I'm still waiting for the case, so admittedly I have not listened to it, but if it is as I'm told it is, you won't complain. Mine has optical input and output, minijacks for mic and line-in and one each for front left/right, rear left/right, and center channel/subwoofer. I'm going to have to buy another set of speakers, because my SB Live Value card only does front/rear left/right, so I don't have a center channel. So you're down to your TV Card.
      Even though I'd rather not use their drivers for the sound card, I still hope your TV card's this: Creative's Video Blaster Digital VCR [creative.com]
      That TV card encodes mpeg-2 in real time, and you can schedule record times. I bought one of those and a couple of 80gb HDs I'm going to stipe together--the board's got built-in RAID via HighPoint HPT372! (And the thing was only $137 w/second day air!). I figure at 1.1mbps, I can fit over 300 hours of TV shows. Or if I figure out a way to convert to divx via a batch file, I might pull 500 hours. And then there're CDs.
      Did you ever just want to have your own library of TV at your fingertips? South Park, Saturday Night Live, Movies, MST3k(saturday mornings!!), MTV, a complete season of Broncos Football, whatever flips your cookie. And it's not even unethical. Total cost to me: $300 for TV card and HDs, plus CDRs, which are cheeeep.
      I'm building the full system for $900, Monitor and all, and it's got an Athlon XP 1800+ and GF2 video. while I could easily pay more for things such as an Extigy, it's not worth so much more money when these new motherboards are so good.

  • I like my peripherals, thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SamIIs ( 65268 ) <{ude.hcetag.htam} {ta} {mAImaS}> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:25PM (#3326534)
    Quoth the review:
    It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old mouse... While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off!

    Ya know, I really like my peripherals. I have a great Gateway Programmable keyboard that has built-in hardware macros (so it's not OS dependant) and a slick logitech trackball that fits my hand well. My printer is pretty crummy, but it has this great ability to turn text into physical paper, which is all I need.

    Having a motherboard which boasts of the ability to make me buy new hardware isn't quite what I'm looking for.

    Sam
    • Having a motherboard which boasts of the ability to make me buy new hardware isn't quite what I'm looking for.

      Well, I doubt it's really aimed at people with old peripherals. It's intended for new machines with new everything.

      And you can't really blame them for trying to cut off old technologies... someone had to start doing it, or we'd be using old standards forever. Remember the old, big, round keyboard adaptor? (I dont even remember what it was called.) If manufacturers never said "OK, enoughs enough, PS/2 or the highway from now on" we'd still be stuck with that crap. You got to make sacrifices if you want progress.

  • "I wish it had even more built-in USB ports, but six is a good start"

    Am I the only one with so many wires connected to their PC that it looks like a plate of spaghetti? 4 ports is more than enough on the computer after that I found it's better to use a hub. I have one on the other desk where my printer and scanner are and one by the keyboard for my MP3 player and Digital Camera.
  • Excuse me, but not having PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports is totally ridiculous: come on, I have a great old keyboard (first-gen MS natural, with the 'bigger' keys) that works perfectly and is not manifactured anymore and a great Logi mouse (forget the model, not manifactured anymore either) and I would have to throw them away just to use this M/B? No way!

    And let's not even talk about my laserjet printer (which works *great* but is, obviously, parallel).

    And what's the deal with no gameport connector (for MIDI)? Why should I pay twice for the onboard sound and for a creative card to hook up my MIDI gear? Not to mention some people that have hundreds of $$ invested in non-USB HOTAS setups.

    I don't like backwards compatibility at all costs, and I like the idea of having some firewire ports and some extra USB ones (even if IMHO USB hubs are a much better idea, I can connect/disconnect things on my desk instead of having to crawl behind the computer) but removing things like keyboard/mouse connectors and parallel ports goes really too far.
  • Does anyone have a mirror of the article or even some photos of this board, the review seems to be slashdotted already. I can't wait to see how they managed to cram *12* ide connectors on the mobo! But very cool all the same. Funny thing about IDE, does anyone even use the lame-o "slave" drive on each chain? With all of the controllers/connectors on modern boards, I don't know anyone that doesn't just have a single "master" drive on each channel.

    Thankfully I work with FibreChannel and SCSI at work... but with 12 IDE channels on a single board, I think I could "suffer" with IDE!!!! Schweet!

  • Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PhotoGuy ( 189467 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:36PM (#3326614) Homepage
    Can anyone guess how successful a Linux installation would be on such a motherboard? (Without even a PS/2 keyboard port, I'm wondering if the RedHat installer would even talk to you, without a lot of hacking and customization.)

    Removing all legacy ports seems a bit silly, to me; it takes so little to provide serial and parallel ports, they're usually integrated into some other multi-purpose I/O chip these days anyway. Sure, don't bother to have the full port on the mother board (just hook up a ribbon cable to some pins, if you need to break out the port), and allow people to disable it. But completely removing it would limit it's utility to some folks. I picked up a little motherboard recently which had no ports mounted, but everything (VGA, serial, parallel, game, sound, etc.) could be hooked up via ribbon cable to a little breakout connector. Saved a lot of space on the motherboard, but still gave you the functionality you might need.

    (In fact, a lot of the same folks who would get excited about the built-in raid, are the same folks who still need serial ports to talk to routers and switches and stuff.)
    • I was wondering the same thing, but I'm pretty sure Red Hat's installer will use USB keyboards. IIRC a friend of mine installed 7.0 with a USB KB. And he's a Linux newbie!

      What I'm wondering about is the onboard video, sound, and ethernet. If that all works with Linux, this thing might be in my next box (of course, that could be a while, I'm still happy with my Athlon 700).

      • Re:Linux? (Score:2, Informative)

        by jrwyant ( 443837 )
        Most BIOSes (excluding recent AMD motherboards using the 760MP chipset, as their southbridge's USB 1.1 is broken) implement a USB software stack providing 'legacy' support (read: makes software think it's the old keyboard controller at the usual IO addresses/interrupt) until the OS boots loads its own USB 1.1/2.0 stack and enumerates the devices. It's one reason why the flash chips housing the "CMOS" programming keeps getting bigger: 4MB, then 8MB, ...

    • Re:Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:52PM (#3327143) Homepage
      You can drop legacy ports as a way of playing chicken with the hardware upgrade cycle. Apple gambled in this way when they shipped the iMac with only USB and Firewire ports; they won in that ADB, serial, and SCSI (except for the high end) devices were quickly abandoned and USB/Firewire took off. If the iMacs had been able to use legacy peripherals, USB would be dead in the water right now and Firewire would be a niche toy like fiber channel.

  • The venerable Mac (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cluening ( 6626 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:43PM (#3326632) Homepage
    You know, Apple got rid of legacy ports a loooooong time ago (at least in computer-time). Of course, I am still a fan of legacy ports (where would all of my cool old hardware plug in?), but this doesn't seem groundbreaking on the grand scheme of things. Heck, Sun even went all USB on their SunRay appliances. Yeah, they aren't "real computers" but still. But, alas, the world is dominated by "innovation" from Intel and Micros~1, so until they do it, it hasn't been done. (like the "first optical mouse" that Micros~1 came up with a couple years ago - what do you call the optical Sun mouse I have that has "1992" stamped on the bottom of it?)
    • "what do you call the optical Sun mouse I have that has "1992" stamped on the bottom of it?"

      I have one of those.. it requires a special mousepad to be used with it, and will only work on that mouse pad and nothing else. The MS optical mouse works on that, a normal mouse pad, a desk, your face, the cat, whatever you want. They are similar, but they are not the same. The MS optical mouse is much more useful and works better.

  • How is this innovative when apple has been including all this stuff in their mobos for quite a while now?
  • I can almost see dropping a floppy drive, but a ps2 keyboard and mouse? I use a USB keyboard and mouse on my laptop, but it does take a fair bit more CPU cycles to use the USB version over the ps2. Mind you, a few seconds longer to boot weblogic is not a huge deal, but like those silly winmodems - why waste it on something like a keyboard and mouse? It is not like this board is headed for "almost embedded" solutions like the 170mmx170mm [via.com.tw] mainboards I plan to toss in my car.
  • This is really disappointing. Just when I thought I found the right board to replace the P2B-LS in my HTPC. But...

    Bzzzrt.

    I still need more than 3PCI slots, even with the cool I/O on this mobo.

    I need:
    HiPix Card (HD Tuner Card)
    Gig Ethernet (You try shuffling 16GB movies in HD around)
    SCSI (DDS-4 for offline storage of said HD movies)

    And it's full. No possibility of adding the next cool thing. I'd have to use an AIW if I wanted to use dScaler for DVDs, etc. etc.

    Seems like omitting SCSI and GigE were severe oversights.

    -Z

  • USB Power limits? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Glorat ( 414139 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:58PM (#3326935)
    I didn't manage to get through the very long article so I don't know if this is covered...

    I have a USB modem (Alcatel Speedtouch) that consumes 500mA of power on one of my 2 USB ports. The limit of power that can be supplied through the USB is... 500mA. As a result, I can't run any extra USB devices on my system without an externally powered hub.

    I am no expert on USB power consumption but might this not mean that having so many USB ports might not be so useful if not enough power can be supplied?

    • Re:USB Power limits? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Johannes ( 33283 )
      The USB specification is 500mA per USB bus. This motherboard has atleast 3 busses on it (2 ports max per UHCI controller, atleast 1 bus per EHCI, probably more).

      However, it's not very intuitive which port goes to which bus, but I'll bet that each set of ports is it's own bus atleast.

  • 10 USB devices, hrm. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:23PM (#3327049) Homepage Journal
    That's funny, my motherboard can support 256 USB devices. I think what they mean as that the mobo has a build in hub.

    Most people won't use more then four or five USB devices. Whats really cool here is the firewire.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:45PM (#3327119)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No parallel port (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joel Ironstone ( 161342 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @10:27PM (#3327284)
    I think PC's lose their usefulness without paralle ports. If your trying to interface some simpel device you've made who wants to bother with USB interfaces and UARTs and stuff. Just read and write to the memory mapped parallel port. Its so easy! whay would I do with this?
    I suppose not buy it, but still. . .

  • How about a BIOS revolution? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @10:59PM (#3327393)
    Argh. So many "legacy" ports got rid of...nice.
    Now, how about updating the bios, so that ALL the old ports are emulated? To the extent that DOS 5.0 will still install from scratch and run?

    Having a USB device is nice, but HARDWARE IS HARDWARE. They should function all by themselves with only the BIOS (think "safe mode"), and not only when some OS-supplied drivers are run.

    How else do people fix things when the drivers break?

  • USB Mice (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 ) <tellarhk@NOSPam.hotmail.com> on Friday April 12, 2002 @12:08AM (#3327681) Homepage Journal
    Honestly, I can't stand USB mice. I do like my USB keyboard, but every time I use the USB mouse under high load, my pointer gets laggy. To heck with that. I'd vastly prefer legacy for at least that -one- peripheral where the responsiveness of an interrupt driven input device is actually meaningful.

  • Aimed at the consumer market (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JPriest ( 547211 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @11:35AM (#3329678) Homepage
    4 RAID ATA/133's also non RAID capible and 2 standaed ATA/133. Hmm.. that's only 12 drives, the article said it's aimed at the consumer market because it uses ATA/133 instead of SCSI but who has a case that's going to hold 12 drives? On the plus side anyone that does use that many drives probably has most of the HDD's they've ever owned connectd to the motherboard, many of them before SCSI's time. That's where I think it makes sense to use ATA, no home user is going to go out and buy 12 SCSI drives and it's too early to have them laying around just yet. This does mark a nice milestone and I will someday soon enjoy running a quad RAID 0 system + my two CD drives. Now that the memory clock sppeed has bypassed AMD's FSB and many new chipsets are structured to run them out of sync you will see additional performance for DMA. It's good to see someone finding a use for it.

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