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Simple, Bare-Bones Motherboards?

Posted by timothy on from the keep-it-simple-stupid dept.

basic0 writes "After my Windows box recently lost its life in a puff of awful smelling smoke, I tracked the fault to the motherboard. Now I'm in the market for a replacement board, but all the boards I find seem to be all-in-one models with on-board everything. I already have a good graphics card, NIC, USB audio device, etc. I just need a no-frills motherboard like I used to be able to buy. It seems like a waste to buy a board with all the built-in stuff (and probably pay extra for it) when I'm never going to use it. Has anyone else had similar experiences? Do a lot of people actually use the on-board stuff? Is it still possible to purchase a motherboard that's *just* a motherboard?"

4 of 627 comments (clear)

  1. You'll end up paying more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You end up paying more for a bare-bones motherboard because of their rarity.

    1. Re:You'll end up paying more by Trizor · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And besides, there are all sorts of advantages to the redundancy the cards you already have will provide. Should something go bad, you'll have a back up, as well as a control set to compare against test results. I'd say get a board with onboard components and maximise yoru use. 2 NICs is especially nice if you find your self in a situation that requires odd network topology and weird on box configurations.

    2. Re:You'll end up paying more by Sique · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There is another aspect: Chip sets.
      To have a chipset being accepted by the motherboard manufacturers, it has to come with easy implementable reference designs and with a small board real estate, that is: a minimum of used area for the chips itself and for the connections to other functions. So chip sets tend to integrate as many functions as possible, because thus board manufactures need less additional circuits and wiring to put those functions at the boards. A large portion of the boards in turn are sold to assemblers anyway, which are keen on boards with many functions already builtin, because then they don't need to put additional cards and ports into the boxes they are assembling.
      So for a board manufacturer to get into the assembler business to sell boards he has to offer fully integrated boards, and he will choose fully integrated chipsets to deliver.
      And if he has once designed fully integrated board series, what's the point in designing stripped down versions again? He will use the same chipsets anyway, because he has all the testing equipment in place for those, he reuses the design of the wiring (once the masks for wiring are done, the manufactunging costs are the same, independent of the number of wires), so all he saves are the few cents for the actual sockets and the soldering of the sockets to the boards.
      Basicly a "bare" board then is nothing else than a board without the sockets, but electrically the functions are there. But to manufacture those boards intentionally you need another production process, another QA process, another packaging. It might be cheaper to just sort the boards according to their final testing results and then specify which functions are 'there' (those that work in the tests).

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Onboard not that bad by Psionicist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to reason exactly like you once and tried to use my software preferences when I choose hardware, no bloat etc, but eventually I found out that hardware "bloat" is not that bad, unlike the software kind. My most stable boxes are the ones that use the onboard components, whereas my old plain vanilla motherboard with a 3rd party soundcard hangs pretty frequently because of god-know-what compatibility issues. When you get onboard audio, at least you know it will work with the chipset.