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Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports
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.
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)
What will the usefulness of 12 IDE ports be? Anyone who needs that much hard drives will be using SCSI
:)
I'd love it. Every time I buy more hard drive space, I have to toss another drive from my box (dvd-rom + cdrw + 2 hd's). I'm working on a nice little pile, currently 10 and 20gb drives at the top. That kind of space is nothing to sniff at. It'd be nice to just pop them in, it's the space I want, not the marginal increase in access time or transfer rate.
SCSI costs more, always has, always will. I shouldn't need to spend the extra $hundreds just to be able to use a few drives at once, hence the need for boards like this. Of course, the mobo probably costs a small fortune, but if a LOT were like this, then my point would make more sense
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
He should tell that to people who bitch about Apple towers only having 4 PCI slots considering Apple's had ethernet, firewire and usb built-in for years.
I wish motherboard manufacturers would stop integrating all this useless stuff. I don't want integrated sound, IDE RAID, or any of that other junk. I don't even particularly care for integrated IDE.
Think of how much more stable the motherboards would be if there were less chips present and less IRQs being shared. Oh yeah, in theory PCI is supposed to share IRQs with no problem, but that doesn't mean it actually works out that way in practice.
There wouldn't be much cost savings associated with getting rid of these functions, but spending $5 or $10 less on a product is always nice.
And, no, sometimes you can't just turn these features off in the BIOS. Even worse, sometimes there's no way to reclaim the IRQs that are lost due to integrated functions! Check out some of the really bad implementations out there. It's a nightmare trying to make those poorly designed boards work. Abit is not known for their stability or great design, so I don't have much faith in this motherboard. Even if Asus made a board like this, I would have some trouble trusting it.
Getting rid of the PS/2 ports is just asinine. They are an industry standard. USB sucks. PS/2 works.
What about the money you throw away everytime you have to lose a hard drive?
"marginal increase in access time or transfer rate. "
the difference between the newest IDE and the newest SCSI is far more then marginal. And God help you if you want to access more then 2 devices at a time.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and compare a 3.9 ms SCSI drive to a 3.9ms IDE drive..oh wait, they don't exist.
As someone who has written low levely IDE and SCSI code, I can assure there are many benifits with SCSI then the access time.
The cosr isn't that much higher, and if there were a lot of mobos manufactured with SCSI, there would be no price difference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why would SCSI be the way to go? This argument has played out dozens of times, but given that IDE controllers are proven, extremely fast, and a dime a dozen, and IDE hardware can be had extremely cost effectively, I'll stick with IDE thanks (despite the hip elusive performance promise of SCSI).
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 want to congratulate the company on making a motherboard that is virtually useless to anybody who isn't bleeding edge. I don't even have a single USB device, and I still use ISA cards extensively because they'er so damn cheap.
I used to do that. Then I decided that I'd rather not have to beat my head against a wall mucking with IRQ conflicts and port addresses to save $10.
USB keyboards are dirt cheap. USB mice are dirt cheap. If you're shelling out for a new system in the first place, replacing keyboards and mice are a negligeable cost (and you'd want new ones regardless, so that you can still keep the old machine active).
Graphics-wise, I'd have to be paid a lot of money to go back to using a graphics card obsolete enough to be ISA, even if all I'm doing is running a 2D desktop. Network-wise, PCI network cards are *almost* as dirt-cheap as your keyboard and mouse.
In summary: If you're buying a new motherboard at all, you can afford to upgrade the peripherals.
Dude, I think he was referring to the price of the disks themselves. a 40 GB SCSI hard disk is at about $400, but the same size IDE drive is only $80. So what if the adapters are cheap? Its the drives that are expensive.
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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
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.
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.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"but given that IDE controllers are proven, extremely fast, "
SCSI is also proven, and even faster.
"and a dime a dozen"
I am going to assume your talking about drives because you can get a UWide SCSI controller that supports 15 devices for about 25 bucks.
yes, SCSI disks are more expensive, but a Corvette is more expensive then a camero. you get what you pay for.
Your performance is really going to take a hit if you start loading up the IDE channels. The SCSI performance is not elusive, its proven. I have a cr-rw and a dvd player and 2 hardisks and I can play DVD, burn a cd, and run a compile in the background. My CPU usage hardly rises.
As far as RAID goes, you can RAID SCSI as well.
I suggest you try programming to both, then tell me which one is better.
but hey, you want to use broken SCSI.... i mean, IDE drive, no skin off my nose.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How is this innovative when apple has been including all this stuff in their mobos for quite a while now?
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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Hence the value of having multiple controllers : Each then has a dedicated pipe to the controller all to themselves, which is a superb reason to have more than the standard 2 controllers (so your CD-R, each of two hard drives, and DVD-ROM drive can all have their own controller).
The problem is aesthetic, not functional. Some folks don't like advertisements on their shirts, cars, or keyboards. Frankly I think extending this opinion to consumer electronics is a losing battle: you've got SONY on your monitor and LINKSYS on your firewall and there's no changing that. I guess the primary difference is that you've got an advertisement for a product you not only haven't bought, but wouldn't recommend, when you have Windows keys on your keyboard.
That was kinda rambly but I hope that illustrates what the problem can be.
I'll stick with IDE thanks (despite the hip elusive performance promise of SCSI)
A promise which it makes good on. IDE fulfills the "cheap", and, sometimes the "good" of "cheap, good, and fast. Pick any two." SCSI fulfills "good" and "fast". You really do get what you pay for.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
50 percent will say "I am not throwing out my old hardware!!!"
20 percent will say "Use a USB hub fool!"
15 percent will say "There's not enough PCI slots"
10 percent will say that Apple already does this.
5 percent will say that Abit are smoking crack.
you ppl r so predicatable
It's only got 3 PCI. Granted a whole heap of the hardware is integrated but there is more in life than sound, ethernet, firewire and USB. Wheres the AGP? This renders the card almost void for a whole host of people. USB? I don't think I'm the only one but I fucking hate it. It's so so so slow and still fairly incompatible with Linux. Linux, yeh, whats the word of compatibility with this board? The article says its only for Windows (excluding 98). SCSI. Why didn't they use that. Mmmm, It's like people took one look at it and ejaculated all over their pants. This board looks pretty much redundant. The page was /.ed before I read anything further than page 1 so some of my ramblings may be false. 'Just my two bits worth, worth'
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
The floppy drive on most modern PCs uses DMA channel 6.
For what reasons is Windows 98 not supported? For the same reasons as Windows 98 won't run, will {Linux,{Free,Net,Open}BSD} be affected? They do not go into any detail on this whatsoever.
What's wrong with my old ball mouse? It works. Why should PS/2 keyboards and mice be replaced by USB? It seems overkill, especially for keyboards, where things should always work, even if your OS is having problems seeing your USB controller. With USB, too many things can break, and leave your system in a hard-to-fix state. (Ever added 'usb-uhci' instead of 'usb-ohci' to /etc/modules, or equivalent? Many OSs don't have USB support in the installer; Debian doesn't at least, and I don't think any of the BSDs do. Does the BIOS emulate an AT interface for USB keyboards?) More importantly, new eras of computing have little to do with shedding "legacy" devices. New eras of computing are set in software ideology and design. Even as far as hardware goes, new eras of computing would be more akin to a next generation of processor, or a new archetecture in CPUs or busses enabling more than 16 IRQ lines. That last sentence seems very marketroid.
The "consumer" market doesn't use 12 IDE devices. The high-end hobbyist/server/gaming markets do. I think it's a shame they left out SCSI, which seems inconsistent with trying to shed "legacy devices". SCSI is great. Why are you thanking them?
I use rounded cables (that I make myself) to improve airflow and increase the ease of routing/positioning cables inside my cases. I don't care about how they look. And no, I didn't know of a reason IDE cables are flat, besides conventional manufacturing techniques in use. Too bad you don't explain why, because the first thing I'd do with these cables is use a razor blade to slice them into segments, and bunch the segments together with zip-ties, as I would any other flat cable.
Uh huh. I take it these MediaXP panels are specific to Abit and their licensees. How much are you being paid by Abit again?
Comparing "dog poo to cat poo"? Maybe you meant comparing apples and oranges. "Ugh"? The reviewer seems to have come straight from the AOL chat rooms... Okay, so I say "ugh" from time to time, but you don't use that word in a written review. That's fairly unprofessional.
One more gripe, but somewhat offtopic: at the bottom of every page, I'm told to use IE 5+ and a 1024x768x32-bit screen. There is no excuse for bad web design that depends on a specific browser configuration like this. </pissyrant>
Not to mention that I have yet to see a 10/100-base-T ISA ethernet card that could actually compete with a PCI card, and lets not forget 1000BT..
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the difference between the newest IDE and the newest SCSI is far more then marginal.
That's right,- at least if you are talking about the price tag.
188 GB SCSI: $999,-
160 GB IDE: 197,-
And God help you if you want to access more then 2 devices at a time.
Exactly why it is nice to have a board with more than 2 IDE controllers. As long as you hook all devices to their own controller, there's no problem accessing more than 2 devices, which you should know, I know as someone who just finished writing a UltraDMA driver for a custom OS.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and compare a 3.9 ms SCSI drive to a 3.9ms IDE drive..oh wait, they don't exist.
And this is where a RAID controller kicks in.
So take your SCSI elitism and buy your drive for 5 times what it should cost. All the best.
SCSI rocks, but until they charge a decent price for a SCSI drive (read: close to the one of a decent ATA133 7200RPM), i will stay away from it. God dammit, I can buy a 80GB ide drive for the price of a 18GB SCSI one. Something is wrong here.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
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?
They claim they support ECC SDRAM, but they don't. Their motherboards run ECC SDRAM, but don't actually use the ECC hardware. See http://cr.yp.to/hardware/abit.html
They should have gotten rid of the floppy port and the IDE (use scsi).
The board is not as big a leap as apple made in the iMac.
With PS/2, the tech on the phone always has to think, "did this moron hook the keyboard into the mouse port?"
I work tech support. I strongly disagree with this statement. We almost never get calls on PS/2 hardware unless the hardware is physically broken.
USB, on the other hand, has produced no end of nightmares with FUBAR'd drivers and inexplicable compatability glitches.
PS/2 is "legacy" all right, where legacy = mature. USB keyboards especially are a disaster waiting to happen. A PS/2 keyboard will just work, no matter what, even if the majority of the system gets hosed. USB requires too much high level OS support and gets knocked out *far* too easily to be truly reliable. Maybe someday, but it just isn't very mature technology yet, comparitively speaking.