7 Jan
2011
7 Jan
'11
2:08 a.m.
On 04/01/11 06:20, Charlie Carothers wrote:
I believe you're correct. I don't do all that
many builds and have not
used MSI yet, but that appears to be a quite nice board. The user
reviews do seem a bit mixed, although the poor grammar in many of the
1-egg ones makes me wonder about the general intelligence and technical
competence of the reviewer. I think the Gigabyte boards I quickly looked
at were a bit lower on the performance curve than your MSI one. I guess
one is lucky to get even one 2-device PATA port and one original type
PCI slot these days.
Deviating from the "stated goal" of classiccmp for a minute...
From personal experience, my ranking of motherboard manufacturers goes
something like this, in order of best to worst:
1. Gigabyte (tied with MSI) -- generally speaking, they make boards that
are a little below the performance curve, but are insanely well-built. I
might still have one of their early Pentium boards (GA586ATM) -- if I
still have it, I know it still works. Or it would if I hadn't stolen the
cache ram for another machine (ahem).
2. MSI (tied with Gigabyte) -- rebuilt a lot of machines based on MS6147
Slot One (Celeron/P2) boards. Never saw a dead board...
3. Jetway -- the JNC92 Atom ITX board is REAL nice, especially when you
bolt on the 3xGbE expansion board -- I've got one in my home server.
Real workhorse, but the fools locked out the NX-bit in the BIOS (grrrr!)
4. Biostar -- lovely AMD boards, got one in the PVR. Cheap and cheerful.
The SB600 chipset in the PVR is a bit braindead, but that's AMD's fault,
not Biostar's.
5. ASUS -- Awful customer service, reasonable boards. RMA'd a
motherboard at significant cost, and got back someone else's broken
board. Called them up on it, and they washed their hands of it. Sod that
for a game of soldiers.
6. PC Chips and all their many and varied alter-egos. These are the
worst motherboards money can buy -- pirated BIOSes (allegedly), zero
after-sales support, shoddy build quality. The only guarantee on these
is that it'll fail within the 3-month (or whatever) warranty.... or that
the guarantee isn't worth the paper it's printed on... take your pick :)
ECS/Elitegroup were pretty good, but I don't think they make
motherboards any more. They were the only major manufacturer to admit to
screwing up during the Capacitor Plague debacle, while everyone else
played the Ostrich Game ("bury your head in the sand and hope the
problem goes away").
I suspect my PC performance needs tend to be a bit
lower than many, and
as a result I view many of the "improvements" as just a scheme to move
more $ out of my account.
True. The Intel Q6600 was a nice chip, 2.4GHz and cheap, but would run
stable at ~3GHz air-cooled. Bolt on a vapour-phase cooler or
water-cooling rig and you could get 3.5GHz out of them, easy, or 4GHz on
a good motherboard (Nforce chipset). Intel chipsets are, in general,
pretty diabolical...
The machine I'm working on now has an "interesting" issue with
SATA-to-SATA transfers. If you transfer data from a SATA drive to USB or
LAN, you can get ~50Mbytes/sec (assuming you're running fairly fast
drives). Try and copy from one SATA drive to another, and it drops to
about 4MBytes/sec max.....
The funny thing is, this only affects SA0 and SA1, the first two SATA
channels. Drop the hard drives on SA2, SA3, SA4 or SA5, and it's fine...
Also: don't even think of using the JMicron ATA controller on the Asus
Rampage Formula and similar boards. It'll happily slow the storage
subsystem down even further... Turn it off in the BIOS, and get a SATA
DVD drive instead (LG drives are tanks but have CD/DVD ripping
countermeasures in the firmware; LiteOns are cheap but very hackable)...
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/