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Non-Integrated Motherboards?
Anonymous Coward asks: "Nowadays no matter where you look, most motherboards have built in everything. Built-in sound, video, LAN, and so on. Are there any reliable manufacturers that still make motherboards without the extras? One example: I want to build a high-end workstation for video processing. Often with on-board audio there are timing issues. Disabling the on-board features doesn't always work. When your on-board NIC fails, a piece of your motherboard is no longer working, not just a replaceable expansion card.
What manufacturers are still making 'barebones' motherboards (and what models) without having to buy a server backplane?"
Some (many?) offer their motherboards with varying amounts of integrated stuff (I know Tyan does this, at least to a degree), but they are hard to find because most people like integrated stuff. That said, I know what you're going through. I've got a great old motherboard but the SCSI on it is completely useless. It really annoys me to have built in SCSI that doesn't work. The rest of it works fine, but it just seems "broken" anyway.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've had great luck in the past ordering online specific models w/o frills. Also, many times local Mom & Pop shops can order specific boards from their vendors (PC King here in Chicago suburbs is working on hooking me up w/ that radeon 9700 non-pro that no retail store seems to carry).
And as for network cards and such dying on the board, well, as bad as that is, I've seen boards with many PCI slots AND integrated stuff, so you don't lose anything by going integrated. The sound may genuinely be an issue, I do not know, but for example the network card, well you just throw a PCI card in. Onboard video has a notoriously bad rep, but believe this has been improving, and it's great to run a second moniter. I wish I'd purchased a mobo w/ integrated video and AGP slot (they ARE out there!), because I'm running 3 moniters. 3 video cards, network, sound, and tv tuner fill up a system real quick!
Anyway, just remember, it may irk you to pay for things your not using, but at the same time, it's really annoying (and very very difficult to fix) when you run out of slots!
I've had the same question, and a product search on NewEgg.com brought up three results from ABIT and none from anybody else. I'm thinking about buying the KD7-E in the near future.
It looks to be a powerful board, but I would be making the switch from SDRAM to DDR, which doubles the cost of the upgrade to get any acceptable amount of RAM.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
I think it is going to become much harder to find motherboards with non-integrated parts. The reasons are integrated cost vs. seperate cost and cost vs. value perceived by the customer.
The cheap AC97 sound chip that a lot of integrated audio uses costs something like $0.10 a unit. Let's imagine that the three stereo jacks in the back also cost $0.10, so there's a hardware cost per motherboard of $0.20. This can represent, to a Dell or Compaq type OEM, a huge savings vs. a PCI card that might cost them a few bucks per computer.
To the customer directly buying a motherboard, it can seem (and usually is) an even better value to get a motherboard with integrated sound and maybe pay a buck or two (the marked up $0.20) than to pay at least $20 for a sound card at CompUSA...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The new ATX-style cases don't give a lot of room for cards, especially when you have to fit in a big processor with a bodacious heat sink. As a result, there's a paucity of available slots. The cost of adding these extra interfaces to the system board is, on the other hand, minimal.
I personally think it's just fine to have this stuff on the mobo, so long as they can be disabled in the BIOS set-up. Having an extra video interface in the machine can be useful for diagnostic purposes, for instance, if you didn't bring a spare card with you; I've used that myself.
Unfortunatly, I do not agree with your recommendation for Tyan boards.
My friend bought a Tyan S2460 (Dual-athlon board) which seemed fairly nice from the beginning. Had a few small issues with it, such as the BIOS needing to be flashed before it would work properly with Win2000, but not much. That is, until it ate itself hardware-wise. About 6 weeks after the initial purchase, he was running along playing a game and it shut off. No big deal, right? He had to go do something else, so he unplugged it and wandered off. Comes back and tries to power it on. It makes the worst noise and starts smelling. He rips the power out and pops it open - can't see anything wrong with it, though. On a whim, he decides to go for it - puts the power back in and fires it back up. Quite literally, in fact, as a small surface-mount IC situated almost underneath the AGP slot flames up and smokes. Needless to say, the board was toast.
The sad part is when he went to warranty it, though. Tyan's warranty policies are pretty screwey, apparently. He would've had to mail it to the original retailer, who'd mail it to Taiwan, where it would be replaced and mailed to the original retailer, who would mail it to him. The shipping costs would have been as much as the board itself, as told quite plainly to him by the retailer's CS rep. Obviously, he never filed the RMA request, as he didn't want to take the chance of paying full-fare for another faulty product.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
As others have alluded to, it is very cheap, and easy, to add most of the integrated features on most motherboards. And, assuming you are talking about full-size, high-end boards, whether you get the integrated parts or not, you lose almost nothing. The integrated video will be disabled if you put a video card in the AGP slot (and yes, most chipsets now support integrated video and an AGP expansion slot), you can put a real sound card in if you like (or you might find the integrated sound perfectly adequate). If you get something with onboard ethernet, think of it as a bonus -- you just saved yourself a PCI slot (because, unless you're running a high-volume server, there is little practical difference between the various commodity ethernet chipsets -- well, unless you need gigabit).
And this stuff is cheap, real cheap, to put on the board -- in the case of video, the only cost is the connector, the sound requires a ten-cent codec and the connectors, etc. You most likely won't save any money deliberately avoiding integrated hardware, and you could end up paying extra for the "privilege". So just get the board with the features you want and don't pay the slightest regard to the integrated hardware, it won't bother you if you don't want to use it.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
" Sound - I know somebody who had integrated sound and some games just hated it (ie. no sound, or bugs with sound). Much like the video aspect, you need 1/4 motherboard components.
However, I do have to agree that integrated sound isn't all _that_ bad if you just have some stereo speakers and aren't an audiophile."
That said, the NForce "soundstorm" integrated audio is rather good.
Ok, how about this: PC hardware is a commodity business. Unless and until you can demonstrate that there's a market for "stripped down" motherboards, you aren't going to find any. There are no "boutique" PC hardware manufacturers, because it's not in the economic interest of the companies who produce motherboards. The number of people who demand that unnecessary hardware be left off is smaller even than the number of Slashdot editors who can spell.
If the original poster is incapable of turning off the built in sound (!) on a PC motherboard, perhaps (s)he ought to be looking at purchasing hardware from an OEM, like Dell?
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I want to build a high-end workstation for video processing.
Not to sound contrarian, but you could always bypass all of these problems by buying a Power Mac. Dual processors, AGP graphics, built-in high-quality FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet, optional PCI cards for SDI and HD-SDI video I/O, optional internal ATA or SCSI RAID or external SCSI or FC RAID, and no audio sync problems. Plus, the power of UNIX, and you can run Shake, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and ProTools.
This is the part where you all mod me down as a troll, or flame me for recommending expensive hardware from a dying company.
I write in my journal
Yes, Most come with the built on sound, but I turn that option off in the BIOS (the same way I can turn off the serial/parallel/hdd controllers also) and it doesn't affect any operation of the system, because as far as everything is concerned, when it doesn't show up on boot, it is not there.
My question has to be...did you even attempt to look before you asked? You stated that you needed "high-end" boards, however the research I have done seems to illustrate that all the "low cost" systems and motherboards use this method, and the more expensive motherboards don't integrate a whole lot other than the standard that has been in place for years now.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
http://iceberg.pchomeworld.com/cgi-win/mobotGen/mo bot.asp
Put in what you want, or don't want, and it will tell you what there is out there.
(Score:0, Interesting)
Creative Labs products are vastly overrated (and their drivers suck), give me a Terratec 6Fire DMX or an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 any day.
you don't know what your are talking about. learn about hardware before posting about it. there are absolutely no circuitry limitations with integrated components. Great video cards can be made extremely small... thats not the point. The reason they suck is because they share the memory bus with the cpu, which creates a huge bottleneck. integrated sound, however, is often extremely good. many motherboard makers are now choosing high quality 6 channel solutions due to the low price premium over crappy sound. also, integrated networking devices are generally faster than pci NICs, because they are optimized with the motherboard's chipset. a motherboard with integrated components is not sacrificing anything. not stability, not expandability, not speed, not quality, not anything. They are, however, offering people added functionality. a motherboard should have all the essential pc components, and its hard denying that sound and networking are pretty essential for most computers today.
This is my pick for the moment
Serves me right for not using preview Terratec 6Fire DMX
Asus A7V333 or P4B553
Gigabyte GA-8SG667You are right, however, in saying that non-integrated mobos are difficult to find...I have found that the quality of mobos is on the rise (in general) and the integrated features save me PCI slots for additional cards (and other crap I lust after, but would rarely use..).
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
NForce 2 chip is GeForce 4, but is the MX-flavor of GF4, not the higher end. I think that you will find GF4 MX boards going for $100 or less...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Reminds me of an old machine I put together for my sister so she could learn Linux. We called it Gimpy.
...not to mention that this was some time in 2000, and a 486 was considered beyond slow.
...eventually Gimpy got retired when my sister got a 'real' PC with enough power to run win2k, but she happily got through a year of APCS using it. Now he sits dormant as a reminder that you -can- get by with less than 100MHZ & use free hardware for useful jobs. All it takes is a little knowlege & a little creativity.
Gimpy started life as a 486DX-25, one of Dell's better models at the time; He lived in a FULL-tower case, with a large, expandable cache memory card and expandable onboard VGA controller (2MB). Gimpy had all the available bells & whistles that were available at the time of his birth, including a comprehensive self-diagnostic tool, built into the BIOS.
I got Gimpy as scrap from school. Primarily he was given away 'cuz the IDE controller on his motherboard was fried; the self-diagnostics would paste a big, red FAILED and lock up immediately after starting to test them. Second, the not-entirely-standard sized AT power-supply was toast.
Fortunately, being friends w/ the tech guy, I got all the goodies I could find that went along w/ Gimpy; enough RAM to bump him up to 24MB (!!!), a 486DX2-66, and a power-supply from an dead 386. The power supply was one that looked like it came from the original PC, you know... with the Big Red Switch on the back corner of the machine.
The first step in bringing gimpy back to life was to get the juice flowing. With the sheetmetal panel enclosing the case removed, the PSU fit without a problem. Unfortunately, trying ot close up the case ended up covering the big red switch that turned the machine on (the orignal PSU had a cable going from a switch on the front-panel to the PSU; remember, this was pre-ATX soft-power). The obvious solution was to take a pair of tin snips & cut a hole in the case, resulting in a tower with a big red switch sticking out of it; classic ghetto-tech.
Step 2 in bringing the beast back to life was getting some HDDs attached. Being a collector of old PCs & components, I dug through my pile of spare parts, and found a pair of 386 'servers' that had disc controllers & decently sized HDDs. The first was an ESDI controller with a 500MB-ish drive attached and this cool bank of 8 diagnostic LEDs that did this Night Rider pulsing thing during normal operation. The other option was a full-lenght, 16-bit ISA slow-narrow SCSI-1 card with the various SCSI drives I'd collected for it (a 300MB Quantum, a 500 from a microVAX-II, and an 80MB Quantum stripped out of a Mac).
Purely for capacity reasons, I went with the SCSI.
After this point, things were fairly simple. Toss a pair of floppies (3.5" and 5.25") on it & give it a NIC (a real NE2000, which got hooked up to my coax ethernet network), give it a monitor (IBM 8514; those things are tanks, I've had 2 and they NEVER die or go bad, you just get annoyed at the tiny screen). I then threw slackware onto it, and told my sister how to login & use man.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Both the initial board and the replacement board (which took almost a year to get) died after a few weeks and just wouldnt boot up anymore.
:p
The retailer told me he wouldnt carry Tyan anymore because of the return rates.
We're now stuck with a dead Tyan mobo and no more warranty
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Regarding the original story subject, it has on-board Ethernet and sound, which is fine for my needs. Personally, I like the idea of having as much stuff as possible integrated, at least for non-critical applications. Less cards to fiddle with means less stuff to go wrong. I'm currently looking for a Mini-ITX sized system with video, two ethernet ports, IDE and pretty much nothing else built in. Everything seems to have USB and Firewire and be designed as a home audio server, and all I want is a faster, quieter firewall/Apache/mySQL/whatever box than my old P133.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
$500? crucial has 2x512MB PC2100 sticks for $260 total.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find out the current specs for this board. At the time I got mine, it took up to two 550 MHz PIII's and 2 GB RAM. I've been satisfied with it.
You know, I've had trouble with Tyan boards in the past -- BIOS problems (that kept the "on-board" SCSI from working), and a board that went up in a puff of white smoke one day. Never the less, I got the Tyan S2462 -- the higher end dual-Athlon board. I carefully followed AMD's specs for power and memory, and I haven't had any problems with it, save for the noise from all the fans to keep it cool. Maybe it's the fact that it's AMD's reference design and not Tyan's, I don't know.
In response to the original question, I use the integrated Adaptec SCSI and 3Com LAN and they perform just as well as, if not better than, what I've seen using separate components (purely antedotial, as opposed to lies, damn lies, and benchmarks). I've overridden the on-board AGP video with my own card, and I don't even recall if it has on-board sound -- I think so (it has everything else), but in any case, I threw in my own sound card. My point is that if you get a high-end enough board, it may have everything integrated, but it will also allow you to gracefully override any of those components.
-"Zow"