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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?"
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?