"The Hermaphroditic Motherboard" Discussion Thread

Hey O/Cers,

Discuss article here.

I personally think the concept is cool and well executed...who DOESN'T want a choice if say the FX-55s are hot one day, and then the 6xx's are hot the next. It'll save you a few bucks.

This also brings up another point:

It looks like the CPU is plugged into some sort of proprietary port. Imagine if instead of buying a new mobo and a new CPU, you just sorta stuck one into a free port and had instant SMP. Might be interesting...if we could get slotted CPUs back (could be done with watercooling).

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Kinda makes you go...hmmmm....sounds great and completely efficient, but the manufacturers of these products are not drop an economically huge setup they have now to make it easier in us...unless of course there is an even larger market for them to corner. I would love to see CPU as easy to upgrade as you can with memory, or PCI cards, etc, but I just don't see that happening any time soon. Although, if someone outside of the major corp's could house this project and make it a reality prior to 'more-than-general' discussion, I bet that would make the deal sseem that much sweeter for some to back the cause.

Just my 2¢ there...lol.

Sgt Hump

The thing is, it will ALWAYS revolve around the computer n00b.

If enthusiasts had their way, every PC would have a triplecascade phase change setup and would be overclocked to 5GHz stock and would be easily upgradeable and all manufacturers would use the same CPU socket, but that ain't happening.

I see this as a way to sort of to go the uber-high-perf guys and say "Here's something that might save you a few bucks", when in actuality, it's not going to beat anything with that SiS chipset. Sort of a lost cause methinks...but an *interesting* concept.

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What I would love to see is the ability to run both at once. I imagine encoding a video in the background on the P4 while gaming on the A64 and watching a move using a video card with a hardware MPEG4 decoder.

edit: Doing this propery is, of course, probably insanely difficult.

Seven said:

The thing is, it will ALWAYS revolve around the computer n00b.

Click to expand...

That was my bad 7! I wasn't paying attention to what was on the Front Page. I deffinately ate my words on that one dude! So once again I apologize, and that deffinately looks like an awesome setup...lol

Embarrased,
Sgt Hump

coole, yeah, but I don't see that much use for it. Noting I'm interested in.

My mobo purchases last three years, so I'm not constantly switching anyways.

I'd like to see them make a card like that for graphics cards. Buying a GPU and memory for it instead of jus getting a whole new video card every 2 years or so.

MetalSiren said:

I'd like to see them make a card like that for graphics cards. Buying a GPU and memory for it instead of jus getting a whole new video card every 2 years or so.

Click to expand...

used to be you could do that. a few years ago. i used to have an diamond 2d card that let you swap out ram and gpu.

I can see a very good use for the idea of static interfaces ( PCI slots, PCIe slots, SATA, IDE, I/O, etc) with the socket/memory/chip/VRM being replaceable to facilitate the easy upgrade, sadly the board is not the best way to execute such design.

Seven said:

Hey O/Cers,

Discuss article here.

I personally think the concept is cool and well executed...who DOESN'T want a choice if say the FX-55s are hot one day, and then the 6xx's are hot the next. It'll save you a few bucks.

This also brings up another point:

It looks like the CPU is plugged into some sort of proprietary port. Imagine if instead of buying a new mobo and a new CPU, you just sorta stuck one into a free port and had instant SMP. Might be interesting...if we could get slotted CPUs back (could be done with watercooling).

7

Click to expand...

a few bucks says that mobo is a big performance hit....

I'm not sure exactly but if it was designed to stick into a PCI express, the bandwidth would still be pretty high, about 16gb/s so it probably wouldn't bottlneck anything.

I think that you have to look at the type of company that ECS and SIS are. You would think that if it was a top notch product that it would carry a special chipset? I think what happened was that SIS is probably the only chipmaker that would be willing to work with ECS in trying to make such a product. Since SIS's integrated chip archetectures are simular for the amd and intel solutions, essentially there is the 655's and 755's for amd and intel, Sis was probably the company best in the position to create a chipset that would work with both. But I think they are doing it because both ECS and SIS are lower quality cheaper motherboard and chipmakers trying to give the image that you can get top notch performance for less. In some cases if your on a budget SIS is not a bad choice. I've had several SIS chip boards and I thought they were pretty good. If you want to build a ton of computers at low cost I think SIS is very strong choice.