Motherboards with no legacy bullcrap

H

hasoos

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2007
Messages
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Does anybody know of any Intel Socket 775 boards that have none of the legacy bullcrap on board (PCI slots, IDE and floppy ports, etc). I have been searching but it seems that every manufacturer has this stuff on their boards, when I would rather have a boatload of PCIe slots and everything else SATA.

Any help appreciated.
 
....what the hell would you use all those PCIe slots for? A bunch of stuff is still PCI. No IDE or floppy, though, that I can understand.
 
Not aware of such a thing. Plus the chipsets only have so many PCI Express lanes available. May I ask why you need so many PCI Express slots?
 
I don't think so, with the little cost and no over head (most can be disabled in the bios ) there is not a lot of reasons to not include it. I agree that added space on the board would be nice And so many of the add on cards are still PCI that it isn't fesable. Myself I would not mind doing away with it ether. But that is easy for me to say as I would only lose a sound card.
 
There are many reasons to do this. 1st of all having older IDe and floppy ports on your system slows your whole system down, and the space taken up by their sockets often makes it hard to fit other componenets in. I would rather just have more SATA ports.

As for PCIe vs PCI, if given the choice between using either, you use the higher performance piece. PCIe works a lot like a switch. When you have PCI cards on it, they actually are hooked to the PCIe bus through a "bridge". These PCI cards don't have the DMA functionality that PCIe cards have, nor the bandwidth for communication.

As for the question for use of slots, I use a PCIe x16 graphics card (maybe 2 one day in the future), a x8 SAS host bus adaptor, to keep processor useage low I use an Intel NIC which has TCP offloading (x1) and I want to get a Xonar PCIe sound card.
 
You're forgetting where you are. This is the [H]. Very few of us need a lecture on the differences between PCI and PCIe.

Having IDE and Floppy controllers on the board doesn't slow it down -- as Valset said, you can just disable them in BIOS and free up the associated resources. It's a bit annoying so far as space, but I don't think it makes near as big a difference as you seem to think. If you're already running SAS and you can easily find boards with 8 SATA ports onboard, I have a hard time believing you need /more/ connections for drives, unless you're running a serious server.

If you /are/ running a 'real' server, you can certainly pay up for a true server board and get everything you want... but the cost of the board alone could easily top $1000, as I imagine you're already aware.
 
Hmm, them kinda mobos are tough to come by, eh?

If only MacPro mobos were sold separately, and sans efi. You'd be in bidness. Well, sli would be nice for you.
 
Is the EFI you refer to on Macs the extensible firmware interface that Intel uses? If so it is easy enough to install windows on those systems, you just have to know what you are doing. I have been hoping PC's would go to an EFI setup for quite a while.
 
IDE ports will be around a little while longer, as apparently all those $25 SATA DVD burners are way out of people's budgets.

I don't know what having a floppy connector on your board does to slow things down. Nor an IDE port. Any decent BIOS lets you disable these anyway. I do wonder why they bother with floppy connectors anymore, tho the irony is boards without them tend to provide their RAID drivers.. on floppy. Go figure.

I haven't used an IDE drive in 15 months, and the last time I owned a floppy drive was about 10 years ago.
 
hasoos said:
There are many reasons to do this. 1st of all having older IDe and floppy ports on your system slows your whole system down,
Click to expand...

Err, they don't slow anything down. Their presence is entirely trivial as far as system resources go.

and the space taken up by their sockets often makes it hard to fit other componenets in. I would rather just have more SATA ports.
Click to expand...

I really doubt that the 1/4th of an inch on the edge of the board is really complicating the trace-out for the motherboard. More SATA ports would be great, but current chipsets support a maximum of 6-8 ports. Most of the 8-port boards actually use one controller to add the last 2 SATA ports and the IDE port Usually a JMicron chip.) , so the IDE port comes "for free" with your 2 extra SATA ports. (

As for PCIe vs PCI, if given the choice between using either, you use the higher performance piece. PCIe works a lot like a switch. When you have PCI cards on it, they actually are hooked to the PCIe bus through a "bridge". These PCI cards don't have the DMA functionality that PCIe cards have, nor the bandwidth for communication.
Click to expand...

PCI Express is definitely way better than old school PCI. That said though, many people are still using PCI peripherals. Most sound cards are still PCI, for example, and most of the PCI Express ones lack any onboard processing, and the one or two that do just aren't as good as a Creative or, even better, Auzentech X-Fi.

As for the question for use of slots, I use a PCIe x16 graphics card (maybe 2 one day in the future), a x8 SAS host bus adaptor, to keep processor useage low I use an Intel NIC which has TCP offloading (x1) and I want to get a Xonar PCIe sound card.
Click to expand...

Yeah, finding a board thats going to accomodate that (assuming two video cards) will be difficult. The problem is that a chipset has a fixed number of PCI Express lanes available to it, so by the time you've got a pair of x16 PCIe slots, there isn't room for much else on most chipsets. The ones that do have the extra lanes to spare (usually by using an extra PCI Express chip) put those lanes into another x16.
 
The BTX standard I think is legacy free because it's meant to have not a lot of crap on it to run cooler.
 
Actually NKDietrich, from what I understand, they do slow the system down. When I was working at Intel an engineer explained it to me, any time you have legacy stuff on board, and have the backwards compatibility code running to keep them up, it degrades the performance of your system. From a board manufacturer standpoint, I don't see why you would want to do it either, as you have to buy the parts to put it in on the board, making it more expensive.

As for the layout, you doubt that the 1/4 inch on the board makes a difference, yet how many motherboard makers out there have shitty layouts because they are trying to pack IDE and floppy connectors on to it?

I run Vista, so on card processing is out the window anyhow.
 
I remember a few years back when Abit released a line of "legacy free" boards without PS/2 or Serial and Parallel.

Everyone threw a fit because they wouldn't run their perfectly modern IDE drives or uber l337 PS/2 gaming mice.

Same thing is happening right now. The number of people who rely on legacy ports or "might" have a use for them far outweighs the [H] enthusiasts who have cutting edge tech. Goodluck finding a board because it's in the interest of the manufacturer to include what is in demand, and currently a floppy on XP is required for RAID and PCI slots are ubiquitous for any less than cutting edge sound card, including Audigy and X-Fi.

Just not gunna happen today, maybe in 2 or 3 more years.
 
hasoos said:
Actually NKDietrich, from what I understand, they do slow the system down. When I was working at Intel an engineer explained it to me, any time you have legacy stuff on board, and have the backwards compatibility code running to keep them up, it degrades the performance of your system.
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Theoretically, yes. But not in practice. All we have to go on for a legacy free board are the Intels (no PS2 ports) or the aforementioned ABIT boards. The Intel boards never fair well in comparisons against their peers and that ABIT board IIRC was not necessarily the absolute top performer in the reviews, but right inline with all the other ones. I'm sure the Intel engineer was right, but we are mostly talking about < 1% difference.

Robert
 
hasoos said:
Does anybody know of any Intel Socket 775 boards that have none of the legacy bullcrap on board (PCI slots, IDE and floppy ports, etc). I have been searching but it seems that every manufacturer has this stuff on their boards, when I would rather have a boatload of PCIe slots and everything else SATA.

Any help appreciated.
Click to expand...

Intel's newer boards do not. The D5400XS, DP35P, DX38BT, and DX48BT do not have legacy ports on them.
 
SuperSubZero said:
tho the irony is boards without them tend to provide their RAID drivers.. on floppy. Go figure.
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LOL yes I bought an Intel board for a client that specified raid and intel board, the raid drivers we on the provided floppy disk, though there was no floppy port on the mobo, just an empty spot on the pcb where it should be... i was really pissed off, i was short of time and didnt want to dick around for 20 minutes creating a slipstreamed windows ISO, plus what was i meant to give to the client for reinstall.. a blank disc with WINDOWS SERVER 2003 written in black marker is hardly professional...

also, at my work we now have like 300-400 floppy cables in a box, that will never be used, as Gigabyte (the only boards we will use now, because other manufacturers are unreliable as fuck esp in the small end of town) provide a floppy cable in every box and we keep all the excess parts when we sell package-pcs.

I build hundreds and hundreds of pcs a year (its basically all i do, real monkey work really).. and i can say MSI are especially bad with cheap boards, on par with ECS now really. And most other manufacturers may take care of the higher-end boards but the mid-range and low-range are all riddled with RA.
 
twsmit said:
currently a floppy on XP is required for RAID
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*cough* *cough* when did this happen.. there are multiple ways to install raid drivers on XP

1. Floppy
2. Slipstream drivers into the OS using OEM preinstall tookit provided with 3 licence boxes of XP or easier with using nLite
3. USB thumb drive using floppy emulation on intel boards that dont provide a floppy port (perhaps other boards too)
 
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