AMD / Intel Hybrid Motherboard

batgirl writes "ECS has taken advantage of their recent merger with PC Chips and released an interesting take on motherboards. Using the highly portable SiS chipsets, they were able to create a motherboard that supports all kinds of processors across all platforms. The PF88 starts as an Intel socket 775 motherboard, but different expansion cards can be purchased to add support for everything from a Socket 939 Athlon64 to a Socket 479 Pentium-M. The price is right, and performance is as good as can be expected. But how many people would make use of this?"

Comments

OS Support?

[TehNSA]

How good would the OS support be with this? Could an operating system be installed with multiple chipset support?

Same as...

[axonal]

Same people who put new engines in their VW Bugs. If the rest of the car is still good, then just upgrade the engine to keep up with the times.

Mark?

[BrynM]

Despite eveyone talking smack, I can see this being a valuable benchmark board. How well do these CPU/Chipset combos work? How well does this ATI card do with an AMD CPU? Okay now how about an Intel CPU? It's not a new idea to expand the CPU, but doing it across vendors like this is interesting.

Re:Not me

[NotBorg]

I'd be interested in how it affects case temperature with the case being divided in two by the processor board. But then again I guess it doesnt matter as much in low performance machines.

It's more or less a gimmick for penny pincher's who think they got a great deal on an e-machine.

Re:PC Chips will never have my trust

[zakezuke]

I'm not buying anything from PC Chips, ever.

I bought into PC Chips in the pentium age... under the Matsonic label IIRC. IBM/Cyrix and motherboard for under $100. I had issues with the motherboard catching fire somewhere around the PC speaker circuity. I had to return a few of those boards.

Interesting but forgot one feature

[layer3switch]

I was doing packaging arch builds on x86 and x86_64 EM64T and ponder if it could be easier to have two types of processor on same board for regression testing and QA. Since cross compile is just a pain in the ass, it would be some what useful if I could flip a BIOS setting to switch between Intel P4 and AMD64 without swapping parts.

For my purpose, I think, if there was a BIOS flip switch, it would have been worth investment. However there isn't (if I'm wrong on this, correction is welcome), so it's just a fancy board with swappable processor which is fairly easy with any ATX casing with swappable motherboard plane without unscrewing bolts and wire works if such thing exists.

Better watch for cut corners and check the cache!

[cdn-programmer]

As I recall it was PC chips who produced the fake cache on the 486 motherboards. Look here:
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html "PC Chips fake cache 486"

I do have an ecs board but it was before the merger. It was stable for years.

nevertheless - there are reputable manufacturers out their so why would I care about ECS/PC CHIPS?

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if anyone else here has had experience with ECS boards, but they suck. Sure maybe they perform decently right now, but what good is that when the board is dead in 6 months. ECS, and PC Chips for that matter, will never be a company i purchase from in the future, no matter how innovative their products become.

-Psy

All kinds of processors across all platforms??

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Now that would be cool, if I could put a G4 or XScale in it.

But what the poster really meant is probably "all kinds of x86 CPUs".

Duh.

Veiled ad for Creative

[Willeh]

Did anyone catch the quite obvious lip service they were giving to the Creative audio card? It got straight 6/6 across the board, as well as an ad at the bottom of the comparison, as well as advice on where to buy it (Buy it now for only ${AMOUNT})

You'd expect them to cover it up a bit more, sheesh!

Been there, done that,...

[Decker-Mage]

burned the t-shirt. Mi Amiga 2000 could accept a daughter-board that could bus-master (or negotiate bus-mastering with SCSI controllers for that matter) the whole system. EXCEPT in it's case, that design was bright enough done to take advantage of other system components that were still left on the motherboard. Putting this through my computer hardware engineering lens here, especially where the various components are located (!!), and I see nothing of advantage to the USER. Not a thing. You are far better off purchasing similarly priced motherboards which will provide you with more capabilities. That does not even count the poor reputation that this (these) manufacturer(s) have with me, and others, historically.

Worse, putting my economist hat on, the only people that this makes sense for are the manufacturer and a few OEM's that may be crazy enough to go for this design. None of the top OEM's I know of would even consider it. Any who would have poor reputations from what I've been able to discern historically. Someone may surprise me and come up with an economic justification here aside from those two considerations, but I haven't seen it in the threads so far.

Nothing to see here. Move on.