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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?"
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
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.
This has been done before, and even today you can buy adapters to get next-generation CPU's working on older motherboards. However, most of these hybrids have to make trade-offs that do not benefit the end-user. It would benefit ECS for economy of scale, but end-users would always be stuck with proprietary expansion modules that may or may not be available anymore by the time they want to change CPU.
IMO you're better off selecting the mobo+CPU that fits your needs today, and by the time you need to upgrade just select a new mobo+CPU du jour..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Can I drive it in carpool lanes though?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
But only if the Intel and AMD chips that provided the features I want were close to the same price. By the time that I needed a new proc, though, I would probably want a new mobo to take advantage of 6 months to a year of new development.
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
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.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
The article summarized this idea well by calling it "a solution without a problem". The whole thing is just so amazingly ill-considered that it's very hard to take it seriously. The only need I could see for something like this is if someone with a P4 needed PCI-E now, and _also_ knew that they wanted to go AMD later. Even then, would they put up with buying a $50 expansion board and running their expensive new processor on that hacked solution?? If PCChips/ECS want to be ambitious, why not endeavor to bring affordable SMP to the masses? Even if the server-classed chips required are expensive, many people must be put off by $300, server-oriented mainboards. This way, they could grab some serious attention in the high-end market and gain credibility. What they're doing now is only going to leave people scratching their heads...
Forget that it can handle all those processors. Look at all the pretty colors.
Maybe it was built by unicorns....
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
If this company has done it's job right, this should reduce the overall cost of the board. If vendors have to keep fewer types of boards around then they are buying fewer types, giving them a price break. By having one mainboard that is common to all daughterboards, the total cost of delivering the motherboard is cheaper (one hopes).
My two cents.
postmodernsideshow.com
SiS, PCChips, and ECS! With those three heavyweights, what could go wrong?
If this company has done it's job right, this should reduce the overall cost of the board.
I don't know what kind of reputation PCCHIPS and SiS have now, but I have 2 500Mhz PCCHIPS motherboards and, I believe, SiS chips for integrated extras like sound. Working with them, under Windows or Linux, was such a horrid experience, it'll take years of hearing every geek I meet telling me their work is great before I ever try anything with either of those names on it again. I remember having problems trying 3rd party parallel cables with their boards and not getting anything to work. When I Googled for info, I found that I was just one of many people with that same problem. I spent 3-5 years developing a unique software system on computers using their boards. Once I got Linux running, I stopped upgrading all packages because those boards are so flakey.
Twice bitten, everafterwards shy.
I'm not buying anything from PC Chips, ever. Anyone else remember when they were making 486 boards with fake L2 cache? Yes, FAKE CACHE. The cache chips were empty, and the board had a modified BIOS that reported whatever cache size the motherboard was jumpered for.
Screw this company, even if it has somehow evolved.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
Well, that's just it. It's *one* chipset, with multiple *processor* support. It should actually make OS support easier.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
It would be useful to PC manufactures who are looking to cut costs while still offering both AMD and Intel processors to their customers. Then they could order one huge lot of the same motherboard, therefore getting a greater bulk discount.
I am reading this article on an mobile sempron powered laptop which is built on the sis chipset SiS-M760GX.
:).
Can't really say that anything is really bad over here, i know the sis graphics sucks, but since this is a work laptop and no gaming machine it doesnt really matter (i knew the lack of graphic performance on purchase already, there had to be something that made this thing that cheap
Other than that, it works just ok, no weird "sis bugs" anywhere to see, the sound is ok for a laptop (even in cpu up/down throttling situations mplayer plays without glitches). I run Ubuntu 5.04 here, kernerl 2.6.12-5. Rock solid (i'm lying now, i crashed once, but that was a ndiswrapper bug). writing a cd or dvd with the dual layer dvd writer doesnt suck the whole perfomance out of the machine (old sis chipsets had serious concurrency issues), usb bus seems ok, and the broadcom wifi works also fine (i'm currently in my bed watching the chine F1 grand prix).
However, from the past i must agree with you that i have seen some veeeryy bad chipsets from sis and pcchips too. But recently sis has evolved pretty well and still maintained the keep the prices low.
I wish SiS would be more linux friendly and release a graphics driver or the specifications for their sis760 integrated graphics chip. the 3000+ cpu on my laptop can make compensations for the usual graphics stuff instead of the chip own features but the 3d performance is just slow as hell since the dri project of linux cant handle this chip yet (whereas under windows i can run enemy territory and colin mcrae rally 3).
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
...this board allowed you to use AMD and Intel CPUs at the same time...
Ditto on this for me as well. One PCChips (later coined PCShits) that I had for a Duron 600 was a nightmare. Two friends also got the same board and their experiences were none the better. After two years of BIOS updates, I finally had something that seemed stable, but I was wary of touching it. It was a releif once it stablized since I built the system for my parents and I got calls every few days tell me what the blue screen was saying this time.
I do have a more recent PCChips board, and it is not as bad. A merger with ECS doesn't bolster my confidence in them, though my experience with ECS is limited.
For now I stick to the mid-range Asus, Abit and BioStars and have had good luck.
Buy bulk in motherboards that will support both.
No dead stock you can't shift anymore.
Regardless of the performance, the words "AMD" or "Intel" is enough to sell things to most of the Joe public...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This reminds me of my old ALR 386. The processor was on a card, with the idea that you didn't need to replace the motherboard to upgrade, only the CPU card.
When I wanted to upgrade to a 486, the CPU card cost more than a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
There are two problems with the CPU card approach. The first is technical; new generations of processors are coupled with new generations of chip sets, and often, new RAM technology.
The second problem is economic; without a CPU card standard, you are locked into a specific vendor for upgrades. The vendor has no incentive to price the upgrade any less than just below replacement cost for the entire MB, CPU, and RAM package.
If this system had come out not too long ago, you'd be locked into PATA instead of SATA, slow RAM, and AGP instead of PCIe graphics. The CPU and MB should always be treated as a unit, and sufficient RAM should be purchased from the beginning, so memory upgrades should be fairly unusual. Graphics card, hard drive, and optical drive upgrades may make sense; not always, not for everyone, but often enough to consider.
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.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
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?
Darn, and I was hoping I could have both CPUs at the same time and call it a Pentathlon. :-)
Support Apple G5 processors ? And both G5 and Intel or AMD on the same board ? And i could by hitting a switch tranfer to my Mac and Whatever :P ... that would be yumm.. and and and...
Compaq used same approach in:
The only cheap and working solutions were the cpu converter sockets, f.ex. from a Pentium II slot to Pentium III socket.
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.
You'd expect them to cover it up a bit more, sheesh!
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Now their motherboards can suck twice as much as before.
-- This sig for rent.
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.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
I've stated this elsewhere in the thread, but I work for a local PC shop, and deal with a good number of both ECS and PC Chips boards. ECS definitely makes the better boards of the two (especially within the last year. The KN1 line of motherboards are absolutely great to work with), but for the most part, PC Chips boards are OK. Nothing phenomenal, but we've not had any real problems with them either. They serve their role as a cheap, 'good enough' board just fine for the people that are looking for that.
The other brands you mention are fine as well. I've had great luck with BioStar (used two of their boards in my personal machines for several years), my experience with Abit has been a bit mixed, and Asus boards are solid, but I find they tend to be overpriced compared to similar boards from other "top tier" manufacturers. IE: The A8N-E in the system I'm typing this on has fewer features and a poorer layout than boards that cost $15-20 less from makes like Gigabyte, ABit, even MSI (who I find are even more overpriced) etc.
Either way, I'm definitely a big believer in going with what works well for you, just thought I'd give my opinion as someone who deals with a bit more volume than most slashdotters do.
ECS/PC Chips is the only motherboard manufacturer i have ever come across that had multiple occurences of Electrolytic capacitors leaking their electrolyte, split and burst ends... the quality of the components on the board are what make a good board... I wouldnt touch these boards if they were the last motherboard available on the planet.