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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
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?
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.
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.
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?
Now their motherboards can suck twice as much as before.
-- This sig for rent.