Non-Integrated Motherboards?

Anonymous Coward asks: "Nowadays no matter where you look, most motherboards have built in everything. Built-in sound, video, LAN, and so on. Are there any reliable manufacturers that still make motherboards without the extras? One example: I want to build a high-end workstation for video processing. Often with on-board audio there are timing issues. Disabling the on-board features doesn't always work. When your on-board NIC fails, a piece of your motherboard is no longer working, not just a replaceable expansion card. What manufacturers are still making 'barebones' motherboards (and what models) without having to buy a server backplane?"

Why?

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

I think it is going to become much harder to find motherboards with non-integrated parts. The reasons are integrated cost vs. seperate cost and cost vs. value perceived by the customer.

The cheap AC97 sound chip that a lot of integrated audio uses costs something like $0.10 a unit. Let's imagine that the three stereo jacks in the back also cost $0.10, so there's a hardware cost per motherboard of $0.20. This can represent, to a Dell or Compaq type OEM, a huge savings vs. a PCI card that might cost them a few bucks per computer.

To the customer directly buying a motherboard, it can seem (and usually is) an even better value to get a motherboard with integrated sound and maybe pay a buck or two (the marked up $0.20) than to pay at least $20 for a sound card at CompUSA...

Tim

space issues

[TheSHAD0W]

The new ATX-style cases don't give a lot of room for cards, especially when you have to fit in a big processor with a bodacious heat sink. As a result, there's a paucity of available slots. The cost of adding these extra interfaces to the system board is, on the other hand, minimal.

I personally think it's just fine to have this stuff on the mobo, so long as they can be disabled in the BIOS set-up. Having an extra video interface in the machine can be useful for diagnostic purposes, for instance, if you didn't bring a spare card with you; I've used that myself.

The legend of Gimpy (OT)

[ameoba]

Reminds me of an old machine I put together for my sister so she could learn Linux. We called it Gimpy.

Gimpy started life as a 486DX-25, one of Dell's better models at the time; He lived in a FULL-tower case, with a large, expandable cache memory card and expandable onboard VGA controller (2MB). Gimpy had all the available bells & whistles that were available at the time of his birth, including a comprehensive self-diagnostic tool, built into the BIOS.

I got Gimpy as scrap from school. Primarily he was given away 'cuz the IDE controller on his motherboard was fried; the self-diagnostics would paste a big, red FAILED and lock up immediately after starting to test them. Second, the not-entirely-standard sized AT power-supply was toast. ...not to mention that this was some time in 2000, and a 486 was considered beyond slow.

Fortunately, being friends w/ the tech guy, I got all the goodies I could find that went along w/ Gimpy; enough RAM to bump him up to 24MB (!!!), a 486DX2-66, and a power-supply from an dead 386. The power supply was one that looked like it came from the original PC, you know... with the Big Red Switch on the back corner of the machine.

The first step in bringing gimpy back to life was to get the juice flowing. With the sheetmetal panel enclosing the case removed, the PSU fit without a problem. Unfortunately, trying ot close up the case ended up covering the big red switch that turned the machine on (the orignal PSU had a cable going from a switch on the front-panel to the PSU; remember, this was pre-ATX soft-power). The obvious solution was to take a pair of tin snips & cut a hole in the case, resulting in a tower with a big red switch sticking out of it; classic ghetto-tech.

Step 2 in bringing the beast back to life was getting some HDDs attached. Being a collector of old PCs & components, I dug through my pile of spare parts, and found a pair of 386 'servers' that had disc controllers & decently sized HDDs. The first was an ESDI controller with a 500MB-ish drive attached and this cool bank of 8 diagnostic LEDs that did this Night Rider pulsing thing during normal operation. The other option was a full-lenght, 16-bit ISA slow-narrow SCSI-1 card with the various SCSI drives I'd collected for it (a 300MB Quantum, a 500 from a microVAX-II, and an 80MB Quantum stripped out of a Mac).

Purely for capacity reasons, I went with the SCSI.

After this point, things were fairly simple. Toss a pair of floppies (3.5" and 5.25") on it & give it a NIC (a real NE2000, which got hooked up to my coax ethernet network), give it a monitor (IBM 8514; those things are tanks, I've had 2 and they NEVER die or go bad, you just get annoyed at the tiny screen). I then threw slackware onto it, and told my sister how to login & use man. ...eventually Gimpy got retired when my sister got a 'real' PC with enough power to run win2k, but she happily got through a year of APCS using it. Now he sits dormant as a reminder that you -can- get by with less than 100MHZ & use free hardware for useful jobs. All it takes is a little knowlege & a little creativity.