Whats wrong with the mobo market?

Trying to find a motherbaord these days is like trying to find a four leaf clover. What the heck is wrong? Do these motherboard companies really think we want an intergrated video card? Who would really need both IDE and SATA raid at the same time? Think about it, really! Just about everyone I know doesn't even use the built-in sound, they add a PCI card for sound.

Has buying a board spiraled down to just picking features? WTF! How about this, instead of adding features, why not try to build boards with better voltage stability , or speed up that slow arse PCI bus ... hell they could at least try to open up known bottle necks. They could spend those few dollars saved for better and more research.

I personal think it is time for everyone to stop asking for features and start asking for results. The market right now is sickning, 10 boards from one manufaturing and they are all the same, save for the features included. I think that is why these companies are misleading us users with so-called 'typographic' errors when listing board limitations and spec's.

I thought I was done, but I guess not. It wouldn't be so bad if you could actually order a board with none of the useless features or feature you know you will never use.

Thats cause the market these days has become so saturated. Mobo manufacturers have added extra features to add more value to their products. I dont think a company can even release a plain vanilla mobo and sell well.

are the features worth their values?

Only if you need them.I would rather have raid.

Built in sound is nice if you aren't an audiophile.

Think about this, companies wouldn't build motherboards with extra accessories if the majority of the people out there didn't use them. Even if they don't use them, they want them.

We crazy hardware fanatics represent < 3% of the computer using population.

i use both the integrated NIC and soundcard an i find it great not to have to put in lotsa extra pcicardds.

As for having both IDE and SATA, i want to be able to use my current IDE drives until i wish to upgrade to SATA without having to buy a SATAcontroller separately

I do agree with you in that built in videocards tend to suck,

I was really happy my eh-rda+ didn't have raid. I don't use it, so why bother. If I wanted it, I can but a card for it. As for onboard sound and NIC, that just makes sense, they have to be so inexpensive to put on the board, why not?

Well I like my Asus cause it has onboard sound, onboard lan (gigabit for future) well I need 2xlan , sata for future, firewire for future many usb. It runs 166fsb.

It's pretty good board for expandability. And I won't run into bad compatibility problems installing expansion cards. So it's convenient.

don't get me wrong at all please, I do like the Lan and raid is great too. But why add sata raid when finding a sata drive is next to impossible. And if they do have raid, lan and sound, why add so many pci slots? Though personaly I wouldn't want their cheap sound chips.

If they want to add stuff, why not add lan with intergrated firewall protection and encryption (hardware, not software), or audigy2 sound chips instead of the 'cheap' 2 dollar crap. I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for those features. I also think that all mobos should be made 6 layers .. not 4!

Eli - just 3%? Thats all? We hardware fanatics are the ones that drive this industry ... if it was not for us, we probably would still be using ISA slots. 3% is hard to visualize.

After looking quite a bit at all the new boards and reading forums, it seems stability is still an issue. Why add all these features if you can't make the old features better!?

- edit: just an after thought .... but I had always thought the PCI bus was there for us to add features and capabilities. Theory is, if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then removing a pci slot for every intagrated feature would allow more room for trace lines. If the distance between those trace lines shorten, then the speed of those components should increase. I also think that the more added features also add more IRQ requirements, creating a greater number of shared devices which would degrade stability. :edit -

But why add sata raid when finding a sata drive is next to impossible

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Well, this is the industry old problem. Hard drive OEMs won't sink money and research into SATA drives until people can use SATA drives. Conversely, motherboard manufacturers may not integrate it because there are no drives for it. Manufacturers aren't that great when it comes to breaking new ground, they don't like to take risk. That said, along comes the newest motherboards with SATA integrated. It's like saying to the Hard drive people "Okay, we put it on there, now you have to start making drives for it." And now they are. It' s the same with broadband. Several years ago the Telecom industry glutted itself laying fiber optic line across the world anticipating a huge broadband emergence. Now, those companies are going bankrupt by the score and most of the world still uses modems. There just wasn't the killer app that would FORCE people to switch.

So I look at it like a process. You have to have it available before people start to use it, and when they use it, manufacturers compete by making it better. A couple years ago integrated sound was utter crap, now look at it, with nVidia's Soundstorm and whatnot. It may not be an Audigy, but it's better than my Creative SB Live! Value. And it's going to get better as manufacturers try to one up each other. Things never get done in a single generation of technology, it's always an evolving process. If you don't want to use something, then disable it in BIOS.

As far as integrated video, this is the perfect solution to someone building a desktop system for work or merely checking email and cruising the internet. It's not meant for the "hardcore" like us. But if I built my grandma a system and I could choose between a decent integrated video such as the nVidia IGP which may tack on 10 bucks to the price of the motherboard, and spending 30 bucks on a cheap (like TnT2) video card I would probably go the integrated route. Of course this presupposes that my grandma would get an nForce motherboard which she wouldn't. She doesn't need it and I don't want to deal with stability issues when it comes to family, but its just an example, although a foreseeable scenario a couple years down the road. Heck, she's just using a TnT right now, not even a TnT2. It's enough to play LAN games of Red Alert 2 though, so there you go.

cBar said:

Eli - just 3%? Thats all? We hardware fanatics are the ones that drive this industry ... if it was not for us, we probably would still be using ISA slots. 3% is hard to visualize.

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Hardcore overclockers is what I mean by fanatics. I have met 3 people in my the town of spokane (500,000+) that are serious overclockers. I'm sure there are many more, but it's nowhere near "huge". What drives the industry is Joe Sixpack (I think it's more like Kegg) and he being an idiot. He pays outrageous prices because companies market their product as superior.



3% maybe conservative, but not by much.

cBar said:

But why add sata raid when finding a sata drive is next to impossible.
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http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101434
Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V ST3120023AS 120GB 7200RPM Hard Drive $179
wait for next 6 moths , there will more choice for sata hdd.