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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.
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 or www.abit.com.twinstead.
Got Wisdom?
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.
So, why exactly are you not only reading, but also posting, to Slashdot?
TRUE geeks buy hardware 'cause it's new and 'cause it lets you do more things faster.
Actually, true geeks design their own hardware from the circuit level up.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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 for yourself.
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?