Slashdot Mirror
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.
check out this site for some pretty pictures of abits new board http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/abit/at7/at7previe w1.htm
According to the cut and paste job above ( Most importantly, IDE RAID...which rocks. With IDE drives, RAID lives up to it's name: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. True, no hot swap, and they're not as fast as SCSI, but for a consumer board (and even non-mission-critical low-end servers), IDE-RAID is the way to go.
Then, there's the advantage of not having to put an older ATA/66 drive on the same channel as an ATA/133 drive. Or, to be able to split up your CD-ROM drive and your CD-RW to make disc to disc copying faster and more reliable. Or, put your swap drive on a different channel (and RAID it!) to give it more bandwidth.
I can think of many more uses for 5 IDE channels (assuming 2 ports to a channel) than I can for 6 USB ports (wouldn't a USB hub be just as effective), or for 2 Firewire ports (let's see...DV camera, and...uh...)
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.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
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?)
Posted from the wireless couch.
why are PS/2 ports labeled as "legacy"?
Because USB does everything PS/2 does in a more flexable way. It's nice to be able to hook the mouse into my keyboard or the back of the computer or even into a USB hub. Computer makers like USB because it eliminates the need to color-code everything. With PS/2, the tech on the phone always has to think, "did this moron hook the keyboard into the mouse port?"
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
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.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
<RANT>
I have to concur on this. My dad bought a Soyo K7V Dragon Plus! with onboard RAID. I configured the RAID and everything was working flawlessly until one day the RAID JUST STOPPED WORKING! It decided that the 2nd drive just was not connected. I wasted a whole weekend and lost a lot of data trying to get it working again. A week later my Dad noticed a little blurb in the documentation about not putting a SCSI card in PCI slot 2 because the IRQ on that slot is shared with the RAID. Well, there was no SCSI card in slot 2, but as it turns out the RAID broke(i didn't realize it at the time) right after I rearranged some PCI cards and ended up putting a FireWire card in slot 2. NICE F#$%#KING design, slot 2 is completly useless on that board if you are using RAID. What good are all these features if they don't WORK TOGETHER?
</RANT>
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. . .
I'm glad to see that stuff go. Configuration of legacy ports is a headache, and even just their presence on the motherboard is a potential pitfall. Furthermore, there is something good about making the life of people relying on them harder: it gives hardware and software vendors a reason to finally update their offerings to the new standards.
If you really must have serial or parallel ports, USB-to-Serial and USB-to-Parallel cables work very well and are cheap.
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.)
USB support is completely integrated into current Linux kernels; USB keyboards just work--there is nothing to do.
Overstated, because, even with 4 USB 1.1 ports, when you take out the PS/2 ports, then your mouse and keyboard will inevitably go into one of those, bringing the number down to 2.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Half the messages here are from people saying "they did it all wrong" or "I don't need all this integrated stuff". Fine. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There are about a million other motherboards with all the standard ports and lots of PCI slots. Why is everyone complaining just because someone decided to make something different? It's not like they're replacing all other models with this one.
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.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
YES, VIA may have the best performance for the Athlon platform right now.
And YES, the VIA chipset boards would be slightly cheaper than nForce boards with similar bells and whistles.
But nobody, and I mean NOBODY but the true DIY masochists WILLINGLY put up with a VIA chipset!
Their service history of the last few chipsets can't exactly be described as "rock solid" here.
k around the hardware message boards for a while. Look at the people who are having problems with their Athlon-based systems. The top three problems are:
Now don't get me wrong. Other chipsets have their own issues as well. But how many of the chipset makes have the high running tally of problems that VIA has had?
I, and many other builders, ESPECIALLY those building for other people's systems, would rather pay a little bit more, and settle for slightly lower performance than deal with a VIA product.
VIA simply needs to work on improving their track record for a while before any serious builders are comfortable with them again.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on ME!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Considering it does not support Win98 probably indicates it needs an OS that supports ACPI meaning that a plain Red Hat or SuSE install might not work.
The lack of PS/2 ports will not cause any problems for Red Hat 7.1 and later (and probably not for SuSE either). I have been able to install using USB keyboard and mouse for a long time. As long as you don't connect them to the USB2 ports as those are not yet supported by Linux unless you go to a 2.5 kernel.
But to say this is the ultimate systemboard... It only has 3 32bit/33Mhz PCI slots. The systems I normally work with have 64bit/66Mhz and some even 64bit/100MHz and 133MHz (PCI-X) slots.
At the very least they could use 64bit/33MHz slots as they are 100% backward compatible with 32bit/33MHz (5v). For 66MHz and up you need 3.3v capable PCI cards.
I know this is a limitation of the chipset used, and not Abit's fault. No consumer chipset has support for more then 32bit/33MHz. You need to to to Intel's 850 or ServerWorks chipsets for more.
Also the memory interface of the Abit chip does not support interleaving. a decent server chipset supports this, doubling your memory throughput.
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.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.