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Simple, Bare-Bones Motherboards?
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?"
You end up paying more for a bare-bones motherboard because of their rarity.
Could it be?
Anyways, I'm in the same boat. I havnt had any luck finding a good motherboard that supports my ram (184 pin RIMM).
If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
I don't think they're sold anymore, and they're so cheep now that you wouldn't save much, anyway. Just ignore whatever extras come with the board.
In fact, you just might save a few bucks in the long run by using the on-board stuff, since it may use less power than the equivilent slot-based stuff.
Not a typewriter
Motherboards are so cheap nowadays that you may as well buy one and disable all the stuff you're not going to use. I guess it's because they are produced in such numbers, that onboard audio/network chips cost mere pennies. It would probably cost the manufacturer more to sell two products, one without the extras.
... are cheaper in my experience, since they're geared toward the value market.
quit yer whining and buy a motherboard.
Yea that zemtobit internet is such superfluous addition.
I already have a good graphics card, NIC, USB audio device, etc.
Well you don't want an on-board graphics card. Just ignore that. If you have an on-board NIC you can remove your PCI card and free up a slot. On-board audio is damn good these days. I paid $80 for a gigabyte board with all the on-board shit and I only use on-board NIC & Sound. They aren't very expensive and if you don't like the on-board stuff then don't use it!
Have you metaroderated recently?
Awesome story, again! Google gets DNS jacked and we get to help this fucknut find a motherboard, and it will probably be posted 4 more times this week by timothy and CowboyNeal HOORAY OFR /.
Slashdot sucks
Thank god... one less Windows user out there now. I am sorry to inform you that they no longer make motherboards for Windows as you might as well install Linux or buy a Mac...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Yeh, there are a lot of "all-in-one" motherboards out there but a lot of highend ones aren't that bad. Personally I was in a similar boat, I had a great soundcard, video card, network card, etc. I settled on an ASUS who's only integrated component was sound. Finding one without integrated video is pretty easy, just look at the companies websites, reviews, etc. However most are the high-end boards, but they're at most $30 or $50 more than the cheaper modes. Ethernet, SATA, and in some cases sound are a little tough to avoid, but it's not big deal. You can disable the components you don't want, but SATA is nice (if you want/need it) and the Ethernet is just nice to have in general. In any case, it's not that bad. I'm sure by now people have posted a lot of models.
I can't imagine how much you think you would save with motherboards that support all this stuff going for $65.
Even in server boards, things still get integrated. Different sets of things (SCSI controllers, low-end video hardware). Reasons? It frees up slots (big +++ in 1U 2U rackmount land), and at the same time drops cost (may be hard to believe, but in the log run it does).
Onboard video is usually pretty terrible (unless you're buying an nForce board), and if you are an audiophile like me, you'll want the 500$ sound card with the 120db DNR:) But in reality, it almost doesn't matter who made your NIC, your USB transcever, etc etc.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I just purchased a socket 775 PCI Express MB with the 915 chipset. It only has 3 PCI slots with 2 PCI express slots. However, about the only thing that it doesn't have is on-board video.
I plan to use the onboard ethernet, perhaps audio, and such.
While Tom's Hardware Guide has a comparison chart: http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20020422/c hipset-01.html
it appears to be somewhat dated.
The core functionality for most of the onboard components is now built right into the chipset. It costs at most a couple of bucks to add the connectors and the rest of the hardware (a sound codec, ethernet transciever, etc.) needed to fully support it, and the added value is more than that.
A lot of stuff that is now integrated on literally every motherboard used to be an add on card. 10 years ago you would be whining "why do I have to get a motherboard with an IDE controller and onboard parallel ports, I already have a multi-IO card". But things change and for the most part the integrated hardware is adequate, and it isn't economically viable to not provide it.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Because the more you have the more things that can go wrong.
running dual video cards and disabling one of them works, but you never really know what's going on. maybe the driver required to disable that onboard card is what goes puff and loses it's magic.
You should be able to build a computer without extra's if you so choose.
And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports? They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards? On Some us because they still have some value but ALL?
I am damn glad Mac's have eliminated all the old hardware ports that don't play nice.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If you are a 31337 g4m3r, integrated graphics is indeed a joke. However, it's good enough for 85% of the users out there, who will almost never run anything more intensive than Word, IE, and the occasional Flash-based game. Same deal with integrated sound -- for Windows event beeps and boops, it's more than plenty.
10/100 Mb/s speeds are now common on integrated Ethernet controllers, and most of them have very little braindamage these days. 1Gb/s on-chip controllers are also already starting to appear.
To put it another way: Parallel, RS-232 serial, and PS/2 mouse/keyboard ports used to require separate expansion cards. Today, they are integrated into the motherboard chipset, and no one thinks the worse for this. For those who need extra ports or special high-performance ports, third-party PCI expansion cards are still available.
So, in short, the way systems are being put together these days, there's no cost savings to be had by breaking out the peripherals you don't need. If you feel a need to put the old parts to good use, donate them to a school, or use them to build a Frankenbox on which to do kernel or driver development :-).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
But considering that even good motherboards that are loaded can be found for roughly the same price as loaded motherboards
So much for my proofreading skills. Oh, well. You know what I meant.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
After my Windows box recently lost its life in a puff of awful smelling smoke,
Next time be sure to clean out the registry on a regular schedule.
sell the parts at a swap meet.
Companies like via, nvidia, intel produce chips which will tend to the largest market segment, which is how they produce chips with everything on board at a cheap price. If they produced chipsets of different types, the production runs will be smaller, support and testing costs larger and pricing higher. I actually expect the likes of AMD to release CPU+chipset chips with say the top 256MB of ram built-in, along with both the north and south bridge, nic phy, audio and usb and everything else in between. The resulting board+cpu will be cheaper than the current board+cpus.
AMD actually currently integrates the north bridge in the athlon64 if I'm not wrong.
Even if you want architectural simplicity and efficiency, its hard to find a simple ARM, m68k or ppc microcontroller without something built-in specialized for its market.Having just a no-frills set of parts was last seen in the 8086 and 6502 days in which each chip did only one thing. And it was expensive as hell.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
>> And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports? They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards? On Some us because they still have some value but ALL?
My new (as of January) Dell at work doesn't have them. It just has 6 USB ports (8, if you also count the two on the front).
Dell can remove them, because they are selling a complete system and know that customers don't need a PS2 keyboard slot, for example.
The separate motherboard vendors still include them because it is cheaper to sell one motherboard version than it is to sell two, where one has a reduce featureset.
In a few more years they will be phased out. It just takes time. ISA took forever to be phased out as well. PCI is obsolete now, too, but even you might hope that they keep a few PCI slots around for a few years until all your old PCI add-on cards have been replaced. (Assuming you don't use all motherboard built-in features.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Another problem with on-board video is that more they almost always use the system's RAM for their memory. Unless you have a lot of RAM (512 MB+) that can really impact the system because the memory is taken away from the operating system. More than that, lag of having to go through system circuitry instead of through its own on-board memory could also be a factor, especially if you don't have really fast system memory.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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.
Unless you consider USB a frill...
Real men get their USB on a PCI expansion card.
paintball
Ive had very good experiences with ABIT barebone motherboards, which I normally use on servers.
The mobo market is intensely competative. So for $120 you can something loaded! How much cheaper do you expect your mobo to get? The mobo is the sacred heart of you machine! Get a good one. If you already have a sound or ethernet card, run 2 interfaces! Its all in good fun! The Linux kernel will surprise you with what it can do. Whats wrong with having 10 USB's? SATA RAID? Muliple DVD's? Get an ASUS, MSI, Abit, Soltec, DFI, AOpen, Chaintech, Gigabyte, Foxconn, Epox ... They're all good. Get something that looks good through your side panel. Get cool cables. What no glass side panel, no LED's? You have a modest machine indeed.
an ill wind that blows no good
I am collecting a bunch of older hardware that I no longer have a use for due to the inclusion of everything on the motherboard. I have been finding that I, and my clients, do not use everything when it's new. Eventually, most stuff does get used.
Further, unless you are rebuying good modern *everything* every few years - the on board stuff is probably as good as what you are using.
What am I talking about integrated on the motherboard:
On board USB:
I avoided USB stuff like the plague for several years. Mostly a question of having legacy equipment around. Now that the drivers have been stable (for a long time), all the slots get used.
If I need a faster USB (due to a newer spec, or I want to do faster data xfer) I can use a PCI slot.
Your two year old USB 1.1 card is slower than my onboard USB2.0 ports anyhow. By a lot.
Firewire:
This was not really used in the PC world. Except for video transfer. Now it's also good for data transfer for portable/external hard disks. This may be the least used included item, but worth it for video. Since the HDTV cable boxes are going to have to have a firewire port, I imagine that everyone will be happy that the manufacturer put them in. Now about those ieee1394 800/400 converter cables...
Ethernet Port:
Yes: Almost always needed, it costs the manufacturer what $2 to add? Yes there are better cards than the cheapo NICs, but if you buy a real server it will have a Gb and a 10/100 NIC anyhow.
RAID:
OK, I wish more manufacturers included it. But it is not used enough except for fanboys. If you really set up a server, you need hardware raid and not this pissant software *&(*& However, if you just want data redundancy it's nice. I like the fact that many SATA raid sets seem to be floating around. Most likely item not to be on a new motherboard with the kitchen sink included.
Sound:
I don't give a *&( about sound for some machines, and for others, basic sound is good enough. Worth $2. It's good enough. I only need one machine with a good sampler, everything else can be crap. Most computers don't really need good sound anyhow.
Onboard Video:
I use it, but it's not good enough for anything graphics intense. Consider this a "For business" feature. Despite the fact that modern on board graphics processors are faster than my entire pile of ancient ATI all in wonders combined. Also, this is the item most likely to be left off a motherboard, after raid.
To conclude:
Not everything gets used at first, but eventually most of it will be. Also, after a few years (the life of a good motherboard) the items included on the kitchen-sink motherboard are prob. better than your old kit anyhow. For example, within ten percent, a NIC is a NIC is a NIC (with few exceptions). Your good NIC from a few years ago is not likely faster than the onboard version. As a second example, your two year old USB card is slower than the on-board USB2 slots.
So you will not use everthing now, but you may eventually. Also, often what is on the motherboard is as fast as your old kit - if not faster. If you use the integrated motherboard, you save the extra cost of the kitchen sink items by sparing the two minutes it would take to install each item of your old kit.
Did you try this ?
There's a good chance that the integrated stuff he's going to get for free anyway is actually BETTER than the expansion cards he's so insanely keen on continuing to use.
Welcome to the reality of computer components - there's no value in trying to save old tech.
paintball
Well if you do happen to use all the integrated junk(although some of it is less junky, such as the ATI or nVidia integrated video) you tend to use less power. And yes, lots of people do use the integrated stuff, because they don't know about the better audio quality, video clarity, network performance(mainly moot on that one), and system performance they can get with dedicated hardware.
That and it is nearly as cheap to get integrated systems than bare mainboards(especially microATX, which is often cheaper because of the massive OEM market for them.)
It's so often you let the smoke out of something and it doesn't work anymore. It's too bad you can't just buy a can of smoke, and refill the motherboard.
If that's what you really want, you can buy a passive backplane and plug in CPU and peripheral boards, up to and including dual Xeons Passive backplanes are used in specialized industrial applications, and will cost you far more than a "loaded" motherboard. This is not something desktop users buy. But they do exist.
I see lots of advice that say buy a motherboard with extra stuff and if you need to disable it in the bios. But many new motherboards are making a choice to go with a non-standard IO layout. While usually this means it comes with the ATX plate you need, there are those of us who bought into cases that use an older style of ATX back plate, non-standard size ATX back plate, or in even more rare and cheaper cases no plate what so ever.
For example... my case is an HP Vectra desktop with that Asus a7v333 motherboard. I'm odd I know. In order to get the provided plate to fit properly I'd need to cut the hole larger by about 10cm or so. Further, the audio jacks extend above the size of the hole making the top jack unuseable.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
What's funny about that is this is one of the things I despise about Mac design. An RS-232 port is so ridiculously easy to make hardware for, you can build a serial interface to something in a couple minutes. Maybe you don't like doing anything with hardware outside your computer, but I have found it absolutely invaluable for that purpose.
If you're running Windows, the integrated on-board stuff will work fine, and as another poster says, you could use the built-in graphics to run a second monitor, which you'll find very addictive. If you're a gamer, you'll probably want to use your own video card, but otherwise it's nice to have your system be cooler and quieter with the built-in video.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Isn't that Abit's new marketing slogan?
Mwave, TigerDirect, Directron, Newegg....there are many sites that provide these barebones motherboards. I have never seen one for less than 80 dollars though. I have found all in one integrated boards for much cheaper. If you are looking for a barebones system though, try Tyan, MSI, or Giga-byte. ASUS tends to pack everything onto the board, soyo and abit are the same. I havent heard or had much experience with epox, dfi (they also have good reviews, and I believe the lanboy is fairly barebones but expensive). Do about 20 minutes searching and you can find what you are looking for. I personally recommend a Giga-byte board. I have had nothing but great luck with them.
Best of luck in your search.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
You can get a motherboard with SATA, ATA, RAID, onboard audio, NIC, etc, for like 60$ CDN. Maybe back in the days when motherboards were 180$ CDN for a barebones, and 250$ for the one with terrible AC'97, was this an issue. Nowadays you buy based on what features you want, and disable the rest.
I use Intel EEPros in all my machines because they are well supported and in every OS I can load. I just disable the onboard NICs. I've noticed, though, that recently onboard audio has become high enough quality that I can move the mouse and not "hear" it on my speakers.
Suck it up!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
How about a bare bones board that cost around $100 - 200, but comes with TOP QUALITY components?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Search this, search that... God forbid we get some actual discussion on a topic. If all you Google-worshipping goons had your way, we'd all have it as our browser home page and it would be locked.
Seriously, that was an insightful topic and interesting answer...
Mod away.
I had a sucky sig.
.... integrated stuff.
Finding a mobo without integrated video is cake, but lots of these integrated components are part of the newer chipsets themselves. So, unless you're doing pro audio, a chipset's Dolby Digital S/PDIF out should do fine. And unless you have one of those slick aggregating 4 port ethernet boards, the onboard network (which is likely gigabit copper) should do fine. Ditto USB2, and even firewire (mine's got FW800 and SATAII). Just buy a board with stuff that supports whatever OS(es) you wanna run on them.
I just built a system based on the GV-3D1 bundle set (screw Apple's lousy Powermac refresh!) that includes a 2x6600GT one-board SLI. All I needed was RAM and media, and a Viewsonic VP201. And when NVidia releases support for SLI in Linux, I have a 20G part waiting for a gentoo build.
Unless it's pro-spec, put your old stuff on eBay or donate it to someplace that can give you a tax writeoff.
I realize that ponying up the extra $16 bucks to get a $56 dollar motherboard from your typical $40 dollar motherboard is quite a strech but if you get this board, you'll be able to play virtually every game made before 2003 and, if your patient, some stuff afterwards.
Not to sound like a snot, but if you become a u83r 1337 g4m3r, you can always give the system to your sister.
Hold on there, cowboy...
How much do you actually think you spend for the stuff you disable? If you think about it, you'll realize that the marginal cost of that stuff on the board must really be quite small: OEMs care about differences of a few cents, plus or minus. In some cases, in fact, it would cost money to take the functionality off the board: if the "net card" is part of a multifunction gate array chip, then it will be cheaper per unit, overall to make twice as many with the extra funtionality than it would be to make one unit of each, one with the functionality and the other without.
(If you think I just implied that the system is cheaper with the net functionality than it would be if it would be without it, you're right. The wonders of mass production, eh?)
You aren't going to get very much for the few scraps of extra silicon.
It's the same for many major sites - check the whois data for Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, Altavista.com and others... All returning similar results seemingly centred around gulli.com, which appears to be a German (registered in Germany) hacking/cracking site. Pick a major search site and do a whois on it, they're all suffering.
./'ers (another story here.)
Also, my whois is now responding with a message saying VeriSign's whois server is down - maybe they're trying to fix it, or it's been flooded with requests from curious
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
As much as I hate HP, I have to admit that they've done one thing right: many of their desktop PCs use Asus motherboards.
I have one HP machine (no, I'm not stupid enough to pay money for one--my parents gave it to me when they got a new one), that has an Asus P4B266 motherboard inside it. It's currently in my closet being used as a server, and I have to say that the board's not bad...
Another old HP machine that used to belong to my parents (which is currently sitting half-dismantled on my bed) also has an Asus board--specifically, a P2B-VE (hey, I said it was an old machine).
There's one site that has a list of what motherboards come with what HP machines. A very large amount of them have Asus boards, and there are also quite a few machines that have MSI boards.
Contrast this with Dell. Dell not only makes their own boards, but they use all sorts of proprietary form factors. A friend of mine, who has a shitty Dell PC, wanted to install a new hard drive. His machine has only one internal 3.5" bay and one external 3.5" bay (taken up by the original hard drive and floppy drive, respectively), so he decided to remove the floppy drive to put the new hard drive in. It turns out that Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement. Yes, I said proprietary screw arrangement of all things. No storebought drive will fit into that machine's drive bays because of that. To hell with Dell. Also, we found out that Dell uses some kind of oddball heatsink/fan--it actually attaches to the case and funnels air through holes in the case. It's like a CPU fan and case fan in one device. Freaky.
As I said above, I hate HP, but I at least have some respect for them. I have no respect for Dell whatsoever.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
There aren't many widely-available alternatives to PCI right now. AFAIK, there's PCI-X and PCI-Express. PCI-X is only viable in the server market, and PCI-Express cards that aren't video cards are practically nonexistant.
PCI-Express will replace PCI one day, but it will be a long time before PCI-Express is even a viable alternative for anything except video cards. Even in the mid-late 90s, when ISA was still around, there were plenty of PCI cards. Now, no one uses Serial and Parallel ports, and USB devices are all oer the place, but you still see Serial and Parallel ports on most boards. PCI Express is still in its infancy--PCI ain't gonna be obsolete for a long time. AGP, on the other hand, will die very soon, as the only area in which PCI Express has made progress is video cards.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Completely false.
Pretty much all of the new on-board audio supports multiple channels (OS drivers may be another story!). The bleeding edge on-board audio even supports High Definition Audio.
Most of the high-volume motherboard chipset vendors -- Intel (the big fish), AMD, NVIDIA, SiS, ULi, VIA, ... -- all implement the same advanced features in their chipsets: SATA2 NCQ, USB 2, HD audio, gigabit ethernet, and more. Just wait 3-6 months, and a new-and-spiffy ethernet/SATA/USB/audio feature will appear for free on a modern motherboard. If its a mass-market feature, of course.
Blindly choosing "no on-board devices" is rather silly. Today's mass market motherboard contains on-board devices, which means the cheapest motherboards give you that stuff for free. If the on-board device meets your feature requirements, use it. Sealed silicon interconnects are far more reliable than PCI slots anyway.
Not really.
The fallacy is that these extra peripherals cost extra. They don't, really. The price you pay is determined by, more than any other factor, the economy of mass producing exactly the same product for such a large market.
Especially in the chipset, those extra transistors come almost for free. It would cost MORE to make another version of the chips with a different configuration. Likewise, even with the same chips, it would cost MORE to make additional models without the extra connectors. There is tremendous savings in manufacturing only one model (or relatively few). Distribution and retail sales also saves costs only having to deal with fewer distinct models.
So just don't use those extra bell and whistles. But don't imagine they're costing you anything extra. The PC motherboard market is extremely competitive, and many companies and individuals shop primarily for the lowest price. If there was an easy way, such as making a different model without some parts, to achieve a lower price, you better believe the manufacturers would do it in a heartbeat.
And there are plenty of budget motherboards. If they could save even a small amount taking off more features, they certainly would. Because they haven't, you can have high confidence those extras aren't actually costing you anything extra.... in the reality of today's manufacturing, distribution and retail marketplace.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Because the 25% of the world that DO use them think they're quite useful. And as explained in other parts of this thread, it's easier to build one mobo with them, than one with and one without.
For the uses:
Quite many people still have old, parallel printers. I for one do, and I'm not planning to throw my nice (though old) laser printer away anytime soon. Yes, it's possible to connect them with a mini print server, but why?
It's also quite common to connect homebrew electronics to the parallel port. For example, it's quite usual to connect a LCD to the parallel port. As an amateur, it's the easiest. Second shot I think is serial. Third one is USB - and believe me (I have tried to find a cheapish possible solution - a friend asked me if it was possible to connect a LCD by USB) - that one is complicated, and expensive! USB was never intended to be a standard used for homebrew circuits, it's far too complicated (of course that doesn't stop the most advanced amateurs, but for the rest of us?).
For uses of serial ports: I use mine for connecting to my TI-86 calculator, with a home-soldered cable. It's also quite common to give chip programmers etc serial interfaces. Also some industrial equipments as PLC:s and PT:s normally have serial interfaces. For everyday devices - modems! Sure, you can get a new modem with USB, but you're probably switching to broadband in a year anyway. Or you just use the modem for faxing, so the old one works just fine. Serial stuff seems to be more uncommon than parallel though, so just having one serial port is ok, I suppose.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Now that is interesting how are you using the serial ports as an emulator, for local connections?
Also since most people here noticed I said most not all. I know serial is still used by some, and at work we have 3 parralell printers dot matrix printers. but personally I haven't owned a dot-matrix in 10 years. My only serial toy is my UPS. everything else is USB.
I noticed this when shopping for mini-itx boards. there is a total of two models without all the other connectors. If I am trying to make a cool small shape, why do I have to ruin it by cutting out such a huge block at once?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Yea right.
I disabled several video cards and sound cards via my motherboard over the years guess what.
Windows installs drivers for them anyway and reactivates them.
I spent an hour one day trying to figure out what was wrong with win 2k, I finally plugged my network cable into the on board jack and things worked for a minute. Windows had reactivated the barely functioning built-in jack (not sure why but it wouldn't hold a connection)
Windows Plug and play does more than just ask the bios for hardware specs, it does a deep hardware scan sometimes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Don't start looking for a new item based on what you don't want, but instead try to find one that includes what you do want.
I had a few requirements for the last motherboard upgrade that I bought for my own personal use, so I made a list:
Support for the last of the Socket-A CPUs
Dual-channel DDR
4 DIMM sockets
At least 5 PCI slots
Two regular IDE ports
Two SATA ports
AGP
I plugged some of these requirements into newegg's search engine, and found several that included all of these features.
It turns out that it was cheaper to buy one that also included on-board audio and a gigabit ethernet jack, than to buy one without.
So, I went with the cheaper one. I've been ignoring the on-board audio since day 1, and decided to just go ahead and use the built-in LAN and free up a NIC for better uses.
I might've chosen one that included Firewire, and on-board video, too, for all I care. I don't have a use for those functions, and I don't foresee having a use for them. But would it piss me off to have paid less for their inclusion, were that the case? Absolutely not.
I know how you feel. I got upset in the 90s when companies irrevocably started putting IDE, floppy, serial, and parallel ports onto motherboards. "What am I going to do with all of these expensive VESA local bus multi-I/O cards?"
Something similar also happened to me in the 80s I realized that the ISA clock card in my XT had been obsoleted by a part on the motherboard.
Needless to say, I got over the trauma of those transitions pretty quickly. You will, too, once you figure out what you're going to do with all those expensive 3c905 and genuine DEC Tulip cards...
[Hint: Local schools, libraries, friends-of-friends, and children-of-friends are all fine places to deposit good hardware which has been obsoleted by a motherboard upgrade. Just make sure you get it to them before time makes it completely fucking useless, and keep it appropriately packaged in antistatic bags or somesuch so it doesn't die all on its own before it gets a chance to be used again.]
Kid-proof tablet..
The jump from AT to ATX motherboards was a step backwards environmentally. We used to have "Super I/O" cards with all our interfaces on them, and we could reuse that card when we switched motherboards to support a new processor.
These days, with all the ports on the mobo, we throw away an extra pound of plastic every time we change chips. This stuff seldom changes -- the ATX port cluster still includes a parallel port, PS/2 ports, and USB ports like when it was introduced. How much of this stuff is sitting in a landfill now?
I'd like to see most of that integrated with the case. Like the front-mounted USB and audio ports, why not put an actual USB hub and USB audio device, along with USB serial and parallel devices, perhaps a USB ethernet adapter, on a PCB inside the case? Let it connect to a single motherboard USB header.
This would give case designers the ultimate flexibility in putting the ports where they want, since a lot of casemodding these days seems to involve port rearrangement. It would liberate the mobo designers from having to mount and support all that plastic, which would in turn allow motherboards to be smaller for those who don't need all those ports. And, for those of us who don't care to have it integrated into the case, we could stick our port cards or port bays into whatever slot or drive mountings we chose.
The problem with onboard video is that 1) it typically uses shared RAM, which is never 100% stable (or if not shared RAM, usually some very small amount -- like 8mb even in current machines!!) 2) in my observation the onboard video circuit is the most likely point where the magic smoke gets out; and 3) *sometimes* it doesn't disable cleanly even if it's otherwise dead, so you can't replace it with a proper AGP card anyway.
Also, motherboards with onboard video are typically made cheaper all around, and are more likely to fail sooner, or not be upgradeable in general -- for every onboard function, typically at least one PCI slot goes away, and how much flexibility do you have in a board with only a couple slots?
Onboard sound and NIC aren't so bad (except for the vanishing slots design thing) because you can have two NICs or two sound cards without the system getting confused, so if one doesn't disable cleanly, it's not a big deal (tho the chips used are usually bottom end/cheapest available). But because of the generally lower quality and other issues, I'd never buy a motherboard with onboard *video*.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Don't buy a cheap motherboard. I bought two AsRock because a Linux shop in London (geekstop.co.uk) sold them as the low-end mobo. I never got the NIC to work on one, Linux won't shut down properly,
but the BIG PROBLEM is that whenever the CPU is busy, the sound is really crap, this includes playing games, and films. I can't run SETI and listen to music!
By the way, don't buy from GeekStop.co.uk. They don't know what they are doing. They installed faulty memory which showed up on a simple memory-tester. They sell hardware with Linux-problems.
temporarily sigless
Why not try the ACME Motherboard Finder