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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?"
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.
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".
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...
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.