Slashdot Mirror
Intel Leaving Desktop Motherboard Business
An anonymous reader writes "As soon as its next-gen Haswell CPUs ship, Intel will start to leave the desktop motherboard business. It will be a lengthy process, taking at least three years, and the company will continue to produce chipsets. The company will be focusing instead on smaller and newer form factors. For one, it will be working on its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) boards, which are 4" by 4". Legacy support for old motherboards and the new Haswell motherboards will continue through their respective warranty periods. 'Given the competitive landscape, it's not a big surprise that Intel is refocusing its efforts on areas that have greater potential impact on future growth. All segments of the PC business are under extreme pressure, with sales slipping and users gravitating toward tablets and smart phones. Focusing on reference designs for all-in-one PCs, Ultrabooks and tablets will enable Intel's partners to more rapidly ship products that appeal to the new generation of mobile users.' AnandTech points out that one of the reasons Intel put out motherboards for so long was to assure a baseline level of quality for its CPUs. Now that the boards coming out of Taiwan are of good quality, Intel doesn't need to expend the effort."
I really need my high-end desktop computer to do my job. How long until something will happen to this market segment will disappear as well? I cannot, for the life of me, see me doing my graphics, game development and 3D on a tablet unless it gets powerful enough for my needs.
Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are much, MUCH better engineered. You get what you pay for.
Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are (were) overpriced. I can't imagine anyone will miss them.
High end Intel motherboards were relabled server boards. Costly, not flashy but stable.
I've still got a couple of Bad Axe's 2 that are still running without a hicup almost 24/24 since 2006.
Wish all Asus/Msi/Gigabyte motherboards were like Intel motherboards.
For a while, it seemed like Intel would dominate the mboard market.
After all, everything was being integrated onto boards (sound, network, Intel good-enough graphics, etc.). Add to that the processor itself, and you've got great vertical integration.
It's hard to believe Intel would give a better deal to an outsider (Gigabyte, MSI, etc.) than to its internal mboard division, no matter what accounting system is used.
So it's hard to figure this out.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Don't expect LGA sockets to go away completely. Maybe low and mid-range chips will go BGA, but high-end chips will likely be LGA for the forseeable future. At least in this humble geek's opinion.
It was not log ago every one had a pc. Soon everyone will still have a pc, but since a large swath of the population a tablet fits their needs, not everyone will bother with a traditional pc.
To use a car analogy, suppose cars did not exist. Once invented a large percent of the population found the fit their needs better than the trucks they had driven. Their were still people that truly needed a truck, so they kept them. Truck sales while not dead, where greatly diminished.
If we have less brands to choose from, the other ones won't have any reason to keep their prices low. So everything will get more and more expensive in no time, while the PC market will continue to shrink.
I have to disagree. Years of using MSI and ASUS has shown great reliability and performance. Every Intel board i have had were total junk. Short lived, cheaply built. Of course, it might have been the processors terrible form factors. Every MSI and ASUS i ever had was AMD powered, and far superior to that LGA crap simply because it had pins and wasn't completely disabled by a little vibration. With my years of experience in the field, i just have to say, i will never buy anything with the Intel badge again.
In my experience, Intel's boards seem to be considerably more reliable. I'm sure my sample size is small, perhaps 100 systems per year, but I have had a much, much lower incidence of problems with Intel motherboards than with Asus or Gigabyte, and MSI doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with those two.
Intel boards are actually made by Foxconn, so it's possible that this will be a change in name only, but I do also value the fact that I can get an RMA on a motherboard from Intel within two business days. Neither Gigabyte nor Asus offer anything like that level of service and paying a little extra for it is entirely justifiable.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
This is a long told story (updating announcments made 3 years ago). It's the equivalent of GMC saying they will leave the pickup truck market to focus on sedans due to strong competition from Ford and Toyota (watch for Hyundai to enter the market). It's unlikely Intel would return to PC boards as the market competition becomes more suppliers in a shrinking market, but just as Volkswagon can change its mind and make Beetles again, Intel is not barred from returning except for the decline in volume of demand. This story is "We mean it. We really are going to stop making pickup trucks, because fewer people are buying pickup trucks and other people are making them as well as we do". It's not the end of the pickup truck market and it's not the end of GMC. Ok, got it.
Gently reply
I have a Terminator-like vision of a dark future where everything is a all-in-one, laptop, or tablet--and all are walled gardens.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I work for a smallish IT company and we build a lot of workstations.
I can vouch for this. ASUS is ok, MSI is complete junk and Intel is pretty solid.
It's quite simple, really. Intel, monopolist or not, can make more money by utilizing its resources elsewhere than in the the desktop market. All of the hype is in the tablet/phone/ultrabook market and that is where they are shifting their resources. It's quite simple, really. The cost to design and produce a board for a tablet is not significantly different than that of a desktop. On the other hand, a tablet board will probably out sell a desktop board 100 to 1 if not more. As such, the ROI on the tablet board is far greater than on the desktop.
For most users, particularly those that are simply consumers of content, the modern PC is overkill, at least in the world of online services where even the fastest consumer internet connection is a bottleneck for the underlying hardware.
Aww. I loved Intel boards. They were the only ones where there were no spelling mistakes in the manuals or bios. =(
Agreed. I've had a brand new system that i just built not boot due to incompatible RAM. It meets all the specs, exceeds some of them, but no good in an Intel board. Drop it in an MSI, works great for years. G.Skill told me it's because they wouldn't pay to be "I7 Certified".
You get what you pay for.
So, I guess Aleive brand Naproxin Sodium is three times as effective as generic naproxin Sodium? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. "You get what you pay for" is a salesman's favorite lie.
reliability for a basement dweller spending all day on WoW or rebuilding his PC and for something that produces revenue are two different things
i've used MSI, Abit and Asus since the 1990's and they were OK for home use. not for work use
If money was involved, i sure wouldn't trust Intel with it. Infact, as a non-basement-dwelling engineer who just shipped a truck load of Dual 12core Opteron servers, I'll take anything over Intel.
My last foray into an Intel motherboard was a
X58 adorned with skulls. It didn't work very well.
I replaced it with an Asus.
The fact intel is making hardware adorned with skulls is confusing enough. An amendum to the don't buy audio equipment named after natural disasters rule of thumb, you shouldn't buy computer gear with skulls on it.
Enthusiast hardware isn't going anywhere, but it will be getting more expensive. Intel is a chip company not a motherboard company after all.
..don't panic
I've never seen and Intel board with an AMD socket, so assuming you run Intel exclusively.
paying a little extra for it is entirely justifiable.
That depends on your budget. Besides, no matter what you buy, in a few years the board is obsolete. The newest RAM, CPU (and sometimes even video cards/Power supply) will not work with your board and you upgrade or make do. After a few years, you can't get $20 for it on Ebay anyway. It's basically a frisbee if it hurls.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I tend to think that the high end ASUS boards are the best money can buy. I've always thought Intel motherboards only compete in the OEM sector.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
There simply is not a big enough market for that,
The closest you will get is something like a mac mini. You could also start with a shuttle PC and go from there.
Most people do not care about the volume a PC takes up in an office, it sits under the desk. Hell, I bought a workstation ATX case more than 10 years ago and I intend to use it till the day I can't find a motherboard that mounts on some form of ATX, it is drilled for everything from Workstation ATX to mini ATX.
Intel mobo = no OC
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Because you used them for work.....I have they worked fine.
I can vouch for ASUS working fine but keep believing Intel has some magical properties.....
You get what you pay for. So, I guess Aleive brand Naproxin Sodium is three times as effective as generic naproxin Sodium? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. "You get what you pay for" is a salesman's favorite lie.
I disagree. Aleve brand Naproxin Sodium is not, of course, three times as effective as generic. It is, however, far more Aleve. You get what you pay for is, generally, true. But you need to be aware of what, exactly, you're paying for, and ask if YOU value it. Generally, the salesman lies about what, precisely, it is that you're paying for.
yeah, and last i read Opterons suck compared to Xeons
You got a replacement board in 2 days or the process to RMA the board took 2 days? Big difference.
I have to disagree.
I've used a lot of MSI boards, and generally, they are very unstable. ASUS isn't bad - aside from ease of using their support going downhill, they tend to have solid builds. However, I could crash most of the MSIs I've had on demand, regardless of OS.
Intel boards (like, Tyan), can be picky, but as long as you do your research before you buy the board, and get compatible parts, or make sure you aren't buying it for a system with incompatible parts (typically memory or PSU, even if it fits and is from a usually-good-quality manufacturer, it may not be ideal), you get a solid system. I've never managed that with MSI.
That being said... I would use the most of MSI boards I have had in certain situations - because their crashes were quite predictable, and if I knew a computer's use case wouldn't trigger the crash - why not use it, it's cheap. However, there was one board I literally snapped in half so it wouldn't accidentally or intentionally get put in another machine.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I agree with a lot of you that the Intel boards are Rock Solid and Stable; I have a P2 here with an Intel D865PERL that works like a charm. But Intel it seems are trying to completely remove itself from the Desktop market by using CPUs already attached to the Motherboard (Less Options, bad for Hobbyists) and now removing its own boards. I use AMD now, with a Rock Solid M5A97. It was in my price range and I don't regret it.
And here's AMD in the background waving at all of you that they're dedicated to DIYers by continuing the Socket brand and you all act like they don't exist and are running around like Chickens with no heads, yelling "The Desktop is DEAD!". Stop that, you look silly.
tablets need more storage space and bigger screens to replace pc's.
Also need a real keyboard and not a mini slide out one.
And no the Cloud can not replace storage space due to a mix of things like slow ISP speeds , wifi interference, the low caps on 3g / 4g as well the gaps in coverage.
Also the SUPER HIGH roaming fees. And the lag can be high on 3g / 4g as well.
Generally, I've found with intel, is that they are very sensitive to RAM voltage, even if it seems the memory would fit - the i7 certified sounds rather silly.
Anyway, do your research before buying any hardware to make sure it is listed as compatible.
The last MSI board I had seemed good, until I tried any two of:
- Run a TV Tuner
- Play an MMO
- Transfer large files over the network (typically local, the internet usually couldn't send me a file fast enough to trigger the issue).
It seemed some combination of multiple high-memory and high-network applications could crash the thing like a charm. Swapped it out for an ASUS, and everything else was the same... Worked like a charm.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
*shrug* of the three, only MSI has every caused me stability issues. Nonetheless, if you are using it for a business, yeah, you want to be a lot more careful, but then agian, you will probably be buying a pre-built from a vendor at that point.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I'd add Gigabyte to the list. Shame ABit isn't around, they made solid stuff too.
Tyan is also nice, but expensive and requires reading and only buying from the compatible parts list if you don't want it do die in a cloud of smoke... You get listed compatible parts, they work amazing. You don't, they go boom. I suspect their tolerances are much tighter than the industry standards - any anything outside of the range, but within industry standards, really ticks them off. However, it's a trade off, if you can keep withing tighter tolerances, you can usually stick to more consistent/better results.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Depends on the topic.
Spices in the US are the same - as long as it's the same type (dried powder vs. dried powder, whole vs. whole), they are so regulated, it's pretty close to the same no matter what you get.
Some times, there is more money and effort spent in components and QA, in which case, "you get what you pay for" is a VERY safe bet.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
My expericne:
ASUS will give you slightly better performance and flexibility, but is *SLIGHTLY* less stable. Almost nobody will ever notice the difference.
Intel, is going to be more stable, but you have a slight speed loss and not as much flexibility (i.e. O.C., available feature sets).
There are more reliable board than ASUS, that don't have the drawbacks of Intel, but they are generally much more expensive, and often not worth it, so I'm not sure if they'd detract from the 'best money can buy' statement...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I'd have to agree.
That 100 systems a year probably puts you over most of the posters here (including myself).
A thought - You might want to look at Tyan if you want a replacement for Intel. They are finicky as hell when it comes to compatible hardware (particularly memory/PSU), but if you stick to compatible stuff, they are very reliable, and the performance is pretty good too.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Why would you have to run Intel exclusively? I have run Intel board machines with Intel CPUs, and nothing at all unpleasant happened to the AMDs on ASUS/ABIT/Gigabyte/Tyan's sitting nearby. Do they come out at night and eat the competators CPUs? Was I just lucky this didn't happen to me?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It's functionally the same thing in my case. I'm close enough to Intel's Louisville RMA depot that they'll have my RMA'd products the day I get authorization and have another one on a truck back to me the next day.
It still speaks very highly of their logistical operation that they process and ship returns that quickly.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The mac mini will run Windows 7 fine. Then you can run the software you want.
I am a geek yes, welcome to slashdot. If you want the tiny market device you are talking about you will too have to man up and do it yourself.
It is cheaper to make one case and one motherboard and use it to make the entry level PC and the high end unit.
It is under the desk because that is where the power is. It could be on the desk behind the monitor if that is where the power was. This is not a problem for 90% of users.
I agree, that $20 800watt PSU is so much better than that other $120 600watt PSU.
Yes. I run Intel exclusively. I don't have a problem with AMD CPUs as such, but no one operating in AMD-land is building system boards as generally reliable as are found on the Intel side of the fence. It does indeed help that there's an extremely narrow range of products where AMD is currently competitive for both price and performance at the moment, but I'd still rather deploy a small fleet of Intel-based systems and have the known-quantity experience than the crap-shoot of what Gigabyte or Asus might have for AM3+ this week.
I also like the fact that I can still find new-in-box Intel-branded motherboards even a couple years after production has stopped. This is really valuable if you have any reason to value uniformity in your configurations, which I certainly do.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny or if you genuinely didn't understand, but I'm pretty sure that by "exclusively" the gp was only referring to the fact that you can't mix amd and intel on the *same* motherboard. In fact, that the gp even quite explicitly mentions this notion in the very sentence you quoted (saying he's "never seen an Intel board with an AMD socket").
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That basement dwelling WoW player is actually the one more likely to overpay for newer hardware that's somewhat faster but remarkably more expensive.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
AMD / Asus -> Crosshair motherboards. Built to overclock, and do so stably. I tend to use them for all of my builds, as their tolerances are exceptional. If someone needs more power, I just turn on the overclocking. It's like a free built-in upgrade. ;-)
I am John Hurt.
WHERE do you add Gigabyte to the list? Parent's list included three categories: "Ok", "junk" and "completely solid".
I come here for the love
> It could be on the desk behind the monitor if that is where the power was. This is not a problem for 90% of users.
My office PC sits like this. It's about the size of an S1 Tivo can would probably make an acceptable HTPC for most people. You probably don't even have to dress it up any. It already looks like it could belong next to a BluRay player or an AV receiver.
Standard desktop size drives. Room for an after market video card. Smallish.
Office PC vendors like Dell and Compaq have been making machines like these since before Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So many things are going in the wrong direction with the computing world nowadays, with the proliferation of Facebooking dumbasses.
Apple sold lots of iPhones and iPads, so M$ decided to jump on their gravy train (again) and turn Windows 8 into iPad-bizarro-land...
PC sales declined because of tablet/pad sales, so OEM's decide they're in the wrong business and start to kill the Real Computer market...
Now I hear rumors that AT&T is planning to kill their land-based Internet services (DSL etc) in an attempt to move to all 3G/4G service plans. This is terrible for anyone who understands what latency is and how it makes your Internet suck. 3G connections usually have about 1000ms latency vs DSL sitting pretty at 40-50ms latency. But even worse, many rural areas still have no 3G service and some can actually get DSL or similar terrestrial lines.
All these trends look like a push by big bizness to retract the last few years of progress in the PC/Internet world. It's time for some new ass-kicking innovations to start, rolling in to bust up these lame trends like The Dude's holy bowling ball towards a bunch of lame duck bowling pins of lametardness.
Not if you want RAID1, limited amount of fans or be able to drive very high res screens. Nor are they likely to be available with i7s, most these days are i3s.
"Motherboard? Where did Daddy go?"
"He left us for a much younger, slimmer model."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Abit? Really? I'll admit to having limited experience, but the one Abit motherboard I ever owned, the KT7a, was a disaster. Not only for me, but everybody else; it had a reputation.
So, where do we start... There was the burst capacitors, there was the latency issues that caused crackling audio if you used a soundblaster card, there was the false promises about compatibility with future processors (don't sell a motherboard claiming it will support future processors if the very next processor using that socket to come out is unsupported), there was the refusal to replace boards affected by design flaws (like burst caps)... Of all the motherboards that I've ever owned or worked with, it was the worst, and Abit's handling of all these problems was atrocious. Even ECS' boards were better, and they were complete garbage.
The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time. Contrast that with a laptop, ultrabook, tablet or phone which are all disposable devices. Most of them, now, you can't even replace the battery, let alone any of the internals. /.ers like car analogies, but I think stereos are a better one. Back in the day, the best stereos were all components. You had an amplifier, a separate tuner, turntable, tape deck, etc. You could purchase the best components your wallet and audio needs dictated. If something new came out, like CDs or a component broke, it didn't require replacing the entire system. That is how it is with desktop computers.
On the other hand the new mobile market devices like tablets and phones are like the mass marketed all in one stereos that started to dominate in the late 70s. They were a marketer's dream, and the accountants loved them, because there were no user serviceable parts inside. If something new came our or something broke, the consumer went out and purchased a new one. Great for the bottom line.
The typical desktop PC can be made to last far longer than its expected useful life (how many computers are still running XP out there?). That is not an option with tablets, phones, ultrabooks and the like. Eventually the battery will fail to hold a charge and since it is not user serviceable, the consumer will have to choose to pay the vendor almost as much to put a new one in or to buy a new device. Easy choice, buy the new device, even if you didn't need the new capabilities. All of those back lit displays also start to dim with time and again are cheaper to replace the device than to send off to have serviced. At least with a desktop, it would involve replacing just the monitor, not the entire computer.
The average consumer convinces themself that the tradeoffs are worth it, but for many of them, they are wrong and they get frustrated and convince themself they just need to upgrade to a better model (Is the iPad X really that much better than the iPad X-1?). The vendors are counting on that! It's all about the marketing.
How many people do you see who would scoff at a $200 netbook, but walk around with a $600 iPad plus keyboard? Both are underpowered, so that can't be it. The iPad does have a touch screen, but is that a $400 advantage, and if so, then why the keyboard? You'll even hear the argument that well, I can leave the keyboard behind and only take it for the times I truly need it -- which is true, but then why do they always have the keyboard with them? Because, they can't admit that a tablet solution wasn't the right solution for their needs and not only did they spend too much, they had to purchase additional pieces to make it work.
Because the average life of the desktop PC can be extended relatively easily and inexpensively, vendors, who depend on ever increasing sales volume as a measure of performance have to switch to a product that allows them to meet that goal, even if it isn't in the best interest of anybody but the shareholders. After all, companies no longer exist primarily to meet a public need, the exist to keep the shareholders happy. If the shareholders are happy, the board is happy. If the board is happy, the executives are happy, etc., etc.
The world has changed and the game is no longer about producing what people need, but instead producing what they will buy, particularly if you can get them to buy it over and over again.
Spices in the US are the same
As someone who works in several aspects of restaurants and food distribution industry, this is really wrong. The spices you get in the supermarket might be all pretty similar, with maybe a little difference between the discount brands, i.e. the one cheaper than generic, and generic or name brands (assuming they are not too old from sitting on the shelf, a few spices are much better when fresher). Although there are a lot of other options, now much more accessibly thanks to the internet.
The only problem is that in general there might not be much of a correlation between price and spice quality. Although there is a correlation with sources not trying to BS you with marketing, which is a little more common with restaurant suppliers in my experience. In some cases, you can instantly smell the difference between crappy and good spices, and it is a bit harder to BS past that.
The only board i have ever had G.Skill not work on is Intel. Their hardware is certainly not worth the price premium. They are like BMW's. Not ever remotely worth the price.
OC = no point for the average PC user. OCing is for when you cant add anymore power with money. IN the last 10 years i have met 2 people who do things that actually make OCing a viable exercise. Everyone else is just burning out their chips for few real gains.
Good-bye
Whooooooooooooosh!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
OCing is not a 'free' upgrade. You pay for it in longevity, stability and reliability.
Good-bye
Given the number of BIOS updates for the DQ77MK, and the remaining incompatibilities with various PCIe cards, I have to object. I've had far more luck with ASUS and MSI for motherboards. Even Gigabyte tends to put out good quality boards.
Companies never existed to meet a private need. That is the foundation of a free market society: To achieve a situation in which parties act only in their own best interests, but in doing so incidentially provide a benefit to wider society.
Mac mini can hold 2 hard drives, the newest ones have SSD caching as well. My 2011 mac mini has a dual core i5 and 16 GB of ram and it runs win7 just fine. If you want a machine like a mac mini, you are going to have to buy a mac mini, because NO ONE else makes anything close to it. You could go with the Antec ISK, but it takes a bit of skill and patience.
Good-bye
Public need, rather. Isn't it annoying when you mistype one word and it completly reverses the meaning?
No, you can install windows 7 directly on a mac mini. Replacing OSX.
Your request is reasonable, but there is no real market for it so it likely does not exist. Anything lower spec is not going to have an i7 you wanted. Unless again you are willing to do the work yourself.
Nothing is wrong with it, get more people interested and it may one day exist.
Hey, the K7S5A from ECS was a great board!
I guess I meant supermarket spices.
In crappy vs. good however, I suspect the issue is more to do with age & handling conditions, which is less of an issue with dried spices, which most people use at home.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Companies never existed to meet a private need. That is the foundation of a free market society: To achieve a situation in which parties act only in their own best interests, but in doing so incidentially provide a benefit to wider society.
Actually Capitalism and the whole concept of supply and demand is predicated on meeting the public (not private) need. Until recent times, if the public didn't need something, the public didn't purchase it and the demand was low. As such, nobody sold it or sold it so low that it wasn't profitable. Think of buggy whips, once the automobile was established.
The other extreme is an economy based on a centralized group (usually the government) determining what will be produced. There the goods are sold, not because of public need, but because there are no other alternatives. If you need a hammer, but all the government produces are wrenches, you buy a wrench to use as a hammer.
What has changed in the past century, is the amount of disposable income the average person has (in the US). This means that not just needs can be met, but so can wants. Consumerism has become rampant and because of easy credit, until recently, it has been a successful strategy for businesses. However, now that consumers cannot deficit spend as readily, the more traditional supply and demand curves re-establish them self and needs are met first. That is one of the reasons of the cash for clunkers program. To encourage people to purchase new vehicles that they had decided they didn't "need", the government had to sweeten the pot to entice them to make the purchase.
When it comes to desktop computers, since most people don't "need" to upgrade regularly, there isn't a long-term money stream for the manufacturers. Therefore, they have to convince you to buy something else, ie. tablets. Tablets do have a long term money stream, because they are basically manufactured to be disposable devices. Of course, you don't have the government to step in like they did in the cash for clunkers program to entice people to purchase them, so what do you do? You shift to producing tablets (and associated components) like Intel has done and then you quit making the competing product -- the desktop. Why? Because, even if people still "need" it, you force them into your new product line, one which is better for your bottom line.
This thread started with the notion of Intel being a monopoly and why would they do something like this? It is precisely because the are a monopoly in the desktop market that they can do something like this.
The OK list.
Yeah, that board was made after VIA stopped making decent chipsets. Can't do much about that, and not everything ABit made was good. Even a good manufacturer can make a board on a bad chipset. You look at both.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
And I just replied to two different posts at once.
Fuck me, I need coffee.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I had a NF7S v2, and nothing crashed the thing, even with decent overclocking. Used a few others as well.
But yeah, that board was made after VIA stopped making decent chipsets. Can't do much about that, and not everything ABit made was good. Even a good manufacturer can make a board on a bad chipset. You look at both.
Heh, MSI and Soyo were my worst experiences, by far.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I tend to think that the high end ASUS boards are the best money can buy
My experience with ASUS has been frustration with low quality third party chips used to provide excessive numbers or SATA and USB ports and other features. These chips are never as good as the integrated Intel circuits. ASUS is the best of the non-Intel lot, but the others do the same thing; solder on whatever is cheapest and makes the specs look better, damn the bugs or driver issues. Intel also uses third party stuff but they're nowhere near as cavalier about it. Intel's work is not flawless, but they fix it when they screw up. If some Silicon Image chip on a Megasustrix motherboard doesn't work right they aren't going to fix it, or even acknowledge the problem.
I've always thought Intel motherboards only compete in the OEM sector.
That hasn't been true for years. On Newegg only ASUS has more (Intel based) motherboard models available than Intel; Intel has been very responsive to the market of people that want good boards. People like me have long since stopped debugging the poorly engineered products of all these little Taiwanese board makers. My last three personal machines were Intel boards and they're all still running perfectly. Two survived transition from XP to Windows 7 with no driver drama; the OS recognized all the important bits out-of-the-box, which is exactly what I expected and intended.
Dear ASUS, this is an opportunity beyond simply gobbling up the market Intel leaves behind. Now is the time to step up your engineering and qualification of components and produce a line of grown-up boards. I don't need or want 35 USB ports provided by 3 phy implementations, all different. I want conservative, well engineered boards that run cool and don't leak capacitor juice all over the place three years after I buy it. Thanks.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Nobody is saying that it will disappear. What they're predicting is that this segment will get smaller. And because of that, some manufacturers will pull out.
We have been lucky over the last two or three decades (especially the last two) in that everyone (Joe Schmoe) needs a computer much like yours and mine. The resulting economy-of-scale allowed many manufacturers to participate, and caused prices to plummet, so that where as a "good" computer used to cost $3000, today it costs around $800 (give or take, depending on how you define "good").
In the future, though, they're saying Joe Schmoe isn't going to buy a computer like yours and mine. He's going to buy something totally different. When someone makes a new low-power ARM-based board which serves Joe's market, you and I get little or nothing in scale-coattail-riding. The manufacturers that we buy from, aren't getting a piece of Joe's action.
So your future "good" computer might cost $1600 instead of $800, your "kick-ass" computer will cost $4000 instead of the $2000 that it costs today, and your "super-kickass" computer will cost .. well, actually that one won't change much because we already don't get much economy-of-scale from Joe since he never buys SMP boxes anyway. It'll be back-to-the-80s, in that your machine will identify you as being a niche user. Someone will see your bedroom or desk and immediately think "nerd." Just like they did in 1983, but didn't in 1993 or 2003, years when your computer was like everyone else's, if I may overgeneralize a little.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If desktop computers just go away, how will we develop the apps for those half-baked non-self-contained computers? It's not like you can run Eclipse on Android, or XCode on iOS.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
"Slighty less stable"? Something is either stable or it isn't. Maybe the word you're looking for is "unstable". Not sure who you deal with, but everyone I know would notice and not tolerate instability or a crash. Modern OSes are pretty reliable. Kernel panics and blue screens are so rare that when they happen, it's noticed.
I have a Gateway machine from 2001. I'm pretty sure it has an Intel motherboard, and it was running rock-solid until I decided to give it a break a year or two ago. Bad idea; it ran flawlessly up to that point, but about a year with no power seemed to to cause all kinds of things to go wrong with it. And ironically, the motherboard is not one of the parts to go. That thing has been rock-solid, along with its 1.7GHz Pentium 4 processor. Its original hard drive has only begun to show signs of damage a few years ago.
Fact is, most pedestrian users have realized they don't need a machine that could crunch FEA or render an entire building when all they will ever do is email and surf. No longer needing a dedicated desk big enough for a keyboard, mouse and chair (or not having the space to begin with) has also been a big factor; get a laptop or tablet and have a seat on the far-comfier couch.
It probably needs a recap. I had to replace the caps on a Dell Optiplex 280 (wouldn't boot). Now runs flawlessly at a friend's place. cost me about 5$ in capacitors.
Many things today go bad because of either bad caps (Viewsonic VA1912, RCA AV Receiver, that Dell, One of my previous machines, or bad solder joints (thank you lead-free solder, just revived an old 52" RPTV just by resoldering the flyback. Found it on christmas eve, was thrown away because it totally lost its convergence)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
My Workstation ATX case is tall enough I don't need to put it on a stand to reach ports and disk drives. A monitor has to be visible, the case does not.
I should take your silly claims as insults and leave you without any assistance. I am sadly a better person than that and will instead try to help you find what you are looking for.
The following should be quite close, you may need to select a different model on that website.
http://us.shuttle.com/ConfigurePackage.aspx?package=74GSH61R4-001-SCG-001
My computer case has had the fans upgraded, since it did not come with fans and actually does hold a RAID array of SSDs. So a sight more modern than yours. You may claim that little raid box is no faffing about. Until it dies and you can't read those disks. Using linux software raid I can just move the drives to a new machine. It outperforms hardware Raid unless you are spending thousands on the controller as well. I know I tested it vs such controllers I have at work.
Ditto, never had any issues with the two I owned
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
OC means running a 150$ CPU at the same specs Intel would like you to pay 800$ for. But yes, for the average user, any modern PC will be fast enough, even the wallmart junk.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Which blithely ignores the fact that most of the PC market never "upgrades" anything except perhaps memory.
My company purchases these cheapass HP tower PCs for ~$300 each. They have three drivebays and three expansion slots. Huge wasteful powersupply. They will never be upgraded, the expansion slots will never be used, they will never get an additional drive installed.
WHY is an overkil tower the cheapest corporate PC option? Only because the PC market is a fucked-up dinosaur, completely stuck it's ways.
If the company you're buying from spends a lot on marketing and advertising, what you get if you pay more is more adverts.
I consciously try to buy from brands that do not advertise as much (though sometimes this is difficult).
Tyan does not make inexpensive boards for vanilla desktops. I can remember a time when they did, but that was probably the mid-90s.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
An i5 at i7 speeds is not the same thing as a real i7. An i7 1155 is not the same thing as an i7 socket 2011. When you buy a $150 processor and OC it, you arent getting an $800 processor, nor are you gaining $650 in value. Its a fools game that was figured out a long time ago by intel and 'gaming' companies. The intel K procesors are perfectly positioned for suckers to buy them and think they are getting away with something. OCing mattered when we had Celeron 300As, it doesnt matter now outside of select use cases. If you are going to OC, start with an i7 at least, otherwise you are just masturbating.
Good-bye
What did I say that sounds like "I want to overclock a fleet of business desktop systems?" In my experience, Asus's definition of "stable" and mine are two entirely different things.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
There are different degrees of stability. A board that crashes once every 5 years is more stable than a board that crashes once every 5 minutes. Are you really arguing that something is stable or it isn't?
So it's not because G.Skill requires higher voltages to work at its claimed speed? It's not like Intel store a list of vendors who are not "I7 Certified" in each motherboard so they can fail to boot.
The world has changed and the game is no longer about producing what people need, but instead producing what they will buy, particularly if you can get them to buy it over and over again.
No one needs a computer. Or a house with plumbing, or a car, or a meaty diet.
Economies have always been about producing what people want, and interestingly people have been and are still willing to pay a lot for fashion and status. (4-5 figures for a handbag? For a dress with practically no fabric? Heh.)
The problem is that the performance you get from overclocking is not worth the instability.
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Bullshit, Asus/Asrock (they are merging into one company) and Gigabyte make damned good boards but you simply have to choose a board designed for your use case. If you want to be gaming and A/V editing if you choose that $29.99 board designed to give grandma a cheap but stable platform to play her FB games you really only have yourself to blame.
I have been using Asusrock and Gigabyte for years without a bit of hassle, the few times I had to walk a customer through changing any setting on either company's boards the problem ended up being PEBKAC, for example they had me put in a gamer board and they then proceeded to buy a bunch of RAM that was bottom of the barrel off of eBay and then was shocked when the board would hang. But you use a little common sense, don't buy a good board and then fill it with eBay special parts and you'll be fine.
BTW does anybody else find it extra douchey that Intel ran Nvidia out of the motherboard chipset business only for them to bail on the business? Between that and Intel hand in hand with MSFT killing the netbook market (because without ION an Atom was painful to use and Intel and MSFT both dream of being Apple) I just hope AMD doesn't end up going under, their chips are still crazy fast for most use cases and Intel is just the poster boy for sleazy corporate crap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A board that crashes once every 5 years
Sounds an awful lot like a different kind of fault than
A board that crashes once every 5 years
I have an Intel mobo (can't recall the model) with my QX9650 and it's definitely overclockable. Gives you a couple warning when you mess with setting manually though. The board was about $140 if I remember correctly. My system is old, but not slow.
We made the mistake of using Asus boards in machines at work. I really regret that now, as the Asus boards are horribly unreliable, and some of them were not cheap either.
The older Intel boards are still chugging along just fine. One of those computers is close to 8 years old. Anything we had from Asus died long before that.
I had a number of ECS builds from Fry motherboard+cpu combo deals. They worked, but I wouldn't exactly call them stable, they also tended to not support features very well.
I had one ABIT board, it worked very well until I physically damaged it when installing an oversized heatsink.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time. Contrast that with a laptop, ultrabook, tablet or phone which are all disposable devices.
Well, no kidding. I know you didn't mean for this, but rather meant for an anti-corporate screed, but did you ever think that you are several years into this "decline," and the reason for the decline is exactly what you said? That is, the desktops people currently own have been made to last a very long time, thus don't need to be upgraded, and therefore, the desktop market has declined?
It's not because of "corporate desires" or "evil shareholders," it's because a desktop from 2009, for nearly all casual users of computers, works just as fine as one built today.
What time period did you purchase those Asus boards in?
Was it the everything was failing because of bad caps time period?
Also usually if there is instability with a product it is best to look at other products that use the same chipset to see if it is the manufacturer or the chipset.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Supply and demand does meet the public need. What I meant is that it doesn't depend on altuism. No manufacturer needs to think 'There's a hammer shortage, I'd better make some more before we have a crisis on our hands.' All the manufacturer does is seek to maximise their own profit, entirely selfishly and greedily. They don't care about the public good - but the laws of supply and demand serve to focus them indirectly into providing the goods and services society needs, because that is where the money is to be made.
There are some things which subvert this model effectively, though. Advertising, for example, is able to effectively convince people to buy products they don't need or even really want.
This may be true now, I havent been paying attention but there was a period of time when you could OC a processor and you could get it. I remember the original AMD phenoms were great for this. They even sold some 3 core processors that had a 4th core that was locked down and you could unlock it!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I considered these, basically Nettops, low to medium speed, no Raid, graphics card is probably good enough for now, but who knows what 5 years will bring. Not even close. Often no optical drive, sometimes no card readers.
At the other end, when I priced an i7 HP desktop, for $1300 they didn't even give me a RAID!! All the money was for the i7 and Windows 8, and the rest of the hardware could have been a $200 Chinese craptastic desktop.
And huge too, it seems as you went up in spec, you went up in size. Smaller is surely better!? Why provide a bigger case with more wasted space? Yet that's what they do!
Anyway, I've said my piece, I think they're missing an opportunity, but believe they'll be history soon enough anyway.
lol, my gaming computer came with a nice processor, a mid-range GPU, a bunch of RAM....and an itty bitty (cheap) MB in a HUGE case. In fact tonight project is to start the transfer to my (prettier) desktop case. Wasted space is an understatement on mine, there is only one slot on MB but like 5-6 holes in the case. There is literally NOTHING in 9 inches of the case. Yup, gave in and bought premade this time as the price was the same for components or system. I'd have bought a better MB and no case but the premade meant it cost like $5 to have them assemble and install Windows and if something is broke i know who to yell at ;)
The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time...
Nope. Nobody (you 3 geeks don't count) upgrades their PC - they buy a new one if they need to. The reason people are not buying new ones is that PCs from several years ago still do everything that users need 'em to do. ei. email, light text, light surfing, photo management, media playback.
That power curve is going to hit phones and pads in the next few years, hard, and the compelling reason to upgrade your phone/pad will be battery life (if we can manage to pull off some good battery technology improvements and/or power management/use improvements).
Sometimes the unavailability of one item limits the uptake of the other. When Pentiums first started shipping, there were relatively few motherboards available for them. (Compared to the 386 stuff.) I can't verify the statement, but something like 90% of the Pentium chips were going onto Intel boards.
Availability of mice had a similar limiting affect on uptake of Windows. Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.
If desktop boards are no longer strategic for Intel, I can see why they'd want to focus their energies elsewhere.
Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are (were) overpriced. I can't imagine anyone will miss them.
That was exactly my first thought. Intel didn't price their boards very competitively, probably out of a desire not to annoy the downstream manufacturers. I often admired the Intel mobos but always then went and bought an ASUS instead, the extra money saved can be spent on the processor and RAM.
My little Linux and tech blog
This is very short sighted and doubtful many business owners are willing to shell out the money for smartphones and tablets so people can enter data into spreadsheets on screens the size of your hand.
If hardware manufacturers stop making PC parts, the death of the PC will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guess I should hand in my geek card now because I no longer see the need in having a computer in the house. I don't even have a laptop anymore. I have an iMac at the office. At home I have my iPad and an iPhone. First iPad I had I got the keyboard case. I found it was handy in a pinch, but not that often. When I got my latest iPad I just got a case that protects the screen and a docking station for my house. At the office, I'm going to use the iMac. At home, I do need to write an occasional long personal email, so having the full sized keyboard is nice there. I use the device to read, watch netflix & hulu, check facebook, watch youtube, and email. For work meetings the iPad with a stylus pen takes notes just fine for me and it a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm pretty sure the capacitor plague was from the early 2000s to 2006 or so. The affected equipment we had to replace was from 2008/2009.
The bizarre thing is that the Asus boards had Intel chipsets on them. I don't think that was the cause. I did check the boards visually, and back in 2005 or so we had quite a few ruptured caps.
The KT133a was definitely a bunk chipset, sure. But most of my problems stemmed from Abit. The "future processor" thing really aggravated me, for example.
The KT7a came out in mid 2001. The AthlonXP came out a few months later in late 2001. The KT7a was plastered with, as one of the features listed, "Supports future socket A CPUs!" or some such thing. However, the very next CPU model that comes out (AthlonXP), only a few months later, was not supported. Abit claimed it was a "hardware limitation", and that only a newer revision of the KT7a would support the XP. Existing users, who bought the board, expecting it would work with the AthlonXP when available, got shafted, and Abit just said "tough luck".
I ended up sticking an AthlonXP 1900+ in the board anyhow, and it more or less worked. There were a few quirks, and the motherboard was utterly convinced it was using a ridiculously highly clocked Athlon 4 mobile processor, (the Athlon 4 was the mobile version of the AthlonXP, and came out half a year before the desktop version). That worked well enough... but the burst capacitor issue made it all kind of moot, and I lived for years with a computer that would frequently spontaneously reboot itself, since I couldn't afford a replacement, and abit refused to fix it (the class action lawsuit against abit was only settled four years later, and didn't cover Canadian customers).
Abit may have made some decent products, but they burned me so badly that I was quite pleased when they went out of business. I had a certain satisfaction that karma had caught up with them.
that's all well and good i guess but tablets are not desktop replacements yet. wile getting better they are still low power devices and probably always will be because your not going to get 10 hrs battery life something packing 16gb of ram and a gtx 660. netbooks got replaced as a low power pc due to there tec stalling due to Microsoft and Intel kept shipping with atoms crippled with really bad gma gpus. the few amd apu models walked all over any other netbook but few where made. tablets took over the handheld market that for sure and nivida is looking to cash in on that with there new tegra 4 android powered handheld.
Every MSI and ASUS i ever had was AMD powered, and far superior to that LGA crap simply because it had pins and wasn't completely disabled by a little vibration. With my years of experience in the field, i just have to say, i will never buy anything with the Intel badge again.
So apparently during all those years of "experience" you somehow avoided noticing that in product lines where reliability is of utmost importance, AMD uses LGA sockets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_G34
Jackass.
If you would not tolerate instability and crashes, your PC would have dual power supplies, have ECC memory, run RAID 1, and basically look like an IBM mainframe and cost as much as one. Fact is, people are willing to put up with some crashes, instability, and downtime to get a computer that costs $500 and not $25,000. The question is, how much?
Disclaimer: I have never seen anybody use a tablet with a keyboard. I don't own one nor do I expect to get one in the foreseeable future.
The (retina) iPad's screen is easily more than 3x as good as that on any netbook I've seen (and in fact better than any PC laptop), even a good phone has better resolution, color and viewing angles. If they sold them as computer monitors I would buy one. If we weren't stuck in the dark ages of fullHD TN panels I'm sure there would be more demand for computing power on desktops, too, but what good will it all do if your photos, websites and games won't look any better? If you can't even have a whole page of a book shown on-screen at once without the text being rendered at such low res as to make it genuinely difficult to read? There are diminishing returns on computing power when your user interface devices are the limiting factor.
I think part of the success of tablets has to do with how advances on traditional PCs have been made too difficult. Windows isn't resolution independent. Netbooks were intentionally marginalized. Outside linux-style package managers you still had to hunt your software down one-by-one from all over the internet until Apple's App Store. The trends for easier and more mobile computers have been apparent for decades. Perhaps "general use" computers aren't all that general use after all if they can't keep up?
which idiot modded this informative?
there are computers in this world that aren't just used for mp3 encoding. i need to run hundreds of (usually idle) processes on my servers and therefore prefer 16 core opterons to Intel's xeons. responsiveness of our opteron systems is much higher than that of our xeon ones.
I guess I should hand in my geek card now because I no longer see the need in having a computer in the house. I don't even have a laptop anymore. I have an iMac at the office. At home I have my iPad and an iPhone. First iPad I had I got the keyboard case. I found it was handy in a pinch, but not that often. When I got my latest iPad I just got a case that protects the screen and a docking station for my house. At the office, I'm going to use the iMac. At home, I do need to write an occasional long personal email, so having the full sized keyboard is nice there. I use the device to read, watch netflix & hulu, check facebook, watch youtube, and email. For work meetings the iPad with a stylus pen takes notes just fine for me and it a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop.
Why hand in your geek card? But from your use description, you don't need a full fledged computer at home and possibly not at the office, either. As such, an iPad seems a good choice. On the other hand, your use case is not everybody's use case.
I don't know if Intel still does this (but no reason to suspect otherwise) but they used to often sell internally used computers to their employees dirt cheap. However they weren't necessarily the boards that were sent out to the market and thus could be more like engineering tests. I hated getting a call into the helpdesk from Intel employees where the first thing they said is they'd just bought this machine for personal use from the company.......
If done properly it's gonna be stable, most processors are sold at lower specs to meet market demands.
I've done my 486 (66@80), my AMD 486 (133@160), P166MMX@200, K6-2 266@338, Cel300a@450, Dual Cel300a@450, Athlon XP-m 2500+ @ 3200+ speeds. That one is capable of reaching 2.5Ghz, but not without upping the voltage, thus running at 2.2 stock voltage. Athlon X2 4200+ @ 2.4, P4s have been done, even my Powermac. I never went over 10% over voltage specs, and never tried to reach twice the speeds. If done in a sensible way, Overclocking was a way to boost performance, but I agree that nowadays it's a moot point since even the walmart junk is plenty enough for almost everybody.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.