Finding a "Clean" motherboard

[logic7]

I've pretty much given up on finding a "Clean" motherboard. What I mean by "clean" is a board completely devoid of add-on garbage. No on-board video, audio, raid, lan, or modem. A board who's PCI slots are not tied to the same IRQ as a bunch of other devices - not with ACPI (thankfully I can install my OS without that), I mean PCI slots 4 and 5 tied together and sharing an IRQ with the USB root hub/controller or slot one being tied to the AGP's IRQ. I need a board that, if I disable my com ports to free up a couple of IRQ's, they don't get automatically reassigned to some on-board device which then shares that same IRQ with everything else.

I just sold my Asus A7V RAID based PC because I was having IRQ conflicts EVERYWHERE and was pretty much fed up with it. I never had this problem with my PC prior to this one, an old Dell Dimension XPS T450 with an intel 440BX board. I had ZERO IRQ conflicts with this machine. I'm seriously considering buying an old 440BX, i815, or even an AMD 751 board just to get away from these problems.

Now, in case you're wondering, I use my PC for music composition. My audio card (Creamware Luna II) cannot share ANY resources otherwise I get pops, clicks and other nastiness out of it. I've even had the PC reboot consistently because the audio card and USB controller were sharing resources and I was moving my USB mouse around too much (resolved when I moved the card to a different slot). I cannot have ANY IRQ sharing. I know ACPI is supposed to eliminate sharing problems, but it doesn't. Most PC based musicians I know install XP or 2000 without ACPI because they have so many problems with it enabled. My Dimension had a 100MB NIC, SCSI card, USB2 card, Audio Card, AGP Video, and an ISA MIDI card in it and had no conflicts.

I'd like to find something "modern" that I won't have any problems like this with and without on-board junk. Otherwise, I'm going back to a P3 800 or so on a 440BX board with a bunch of add-on cards (including an ATA133 card). Oh, no VIA chipset boards either, they have a PCI latency problem and that causes problems with my Audio stuff. I still prefer Intel and PURE AMD boards (no AMD/VIA hybrids), so if any of you know of such a board, please let me know of it.

Detroit Techno
http://allways.nu
http://www.geocities.com/labwerx

 

[Scout]

I can't think of a modern motherboard that doesn't offer at least some of these on-board add-on's. My Tyan Tiger MP board is pretty plain, but that's an older design.

I would think you should be able to disable most of these on-board features in the BIOS and that should free up the resources.

Rather than go with a slower BX solution, I'd probably go with one of the Intel 845PE or 865PE boards and give it another shot.

Good luck!

Scout
700 Mflops in SETI!

 

[Ed_Phoon]

You may try to disable those on board devices from bios, it should work.

 

[logic7]

See, there's the other problem. With my last board, I couldn't disable the RAID controller. I've come across a few boards like that.

It's unfortunate that boards have this on-board stuff. I don't like paying for something that I don't want, and would never use anyways. Besides that, a lot of it doesn't work well with Linux and (especially) FreeBSD. I usually have Win2000, Linux, and FreeBSD installed on my machine and I carefully pick my components to make sure they work well with all of my OS's.

Detroit Techno
http://allways.nu
http://www.geocities.com/labwerx

 

[Black_Cat]

Besides that, a lot of it doesn't work well with Linux and (especially) FreeBSD.

...and there you have it, folks!

Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer. -- Homer Simpson.

 

[Crashman]

Yes, you couldn't disable RAID on the A7V. That was Asus's big idea. Those boards were pretty trashy to begin with.

Anyway, Intel has an 865 chipset board without sound I've heard, but it has LAN. The Abit IC7 has no LAN, but it has sound.

I suggest you just go with a good motherboard to begin with and disable what you don't need. Abit IS7 has a good price and a couple features you might actually want on the board: The ICH5R SATA RAID built into the southbridge (treated like an IDE controller) and a firewire controller. And if you don't even want SATA, you could get the IS7-E.

Of course the IS7-E still has sound and Lan, but it can be disabled. Very high quality, inexpensive board.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[logic7]

Having said that (about the intel/abit boards), what solution is there for an Athlon. I really liked my Duron, and have built DAW machines in the past based on slotA classic and thunderbird Athlon's on AMD 751 based boards. Rock solid and stable as hell. VIA is not an option (nor are hybrid AMD 761/VIA 686 boards), but then this leaves me Nvidia, SiS, and ALi chipsets. Among them, which chipset is the most stable, has great driver support, and who mkaed the best boards?

Detroit Techno
http://allways.nu
http://www.geocities.com/labwerx

 

[pIII_Man]

nforce or maybe sis...i would prolly go for the nforce...


If it isn't a P6 then it isn't a procesor
110% BX fanboy

 

[Crashman]

The SiS 755 chipset is the best so far for the Athlon FX, nVidia makes the best Athlon XP chipsets.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[athalus]

frankly i think in the long run you are going to want some of these things. for example:
lan: most of the major mfg's uses the gigabyte lan which is better than most of the retail cards out there. and if you do any serious downloading you have to add a card anyway for a cable modem and that's one less pci slot you fill up. one other thing about lan if you want to transfer things from one computer to another you can use the lan w/a crossover cable to transfer your data, or data from a friends computer, w/out taking the time to burn a cd or a floppy etc etc.

raid: i have raid but i don't have it disabled. people forget that there are other uses for raid. w/raid you can have up to 8 ide devices 4-master/4-slave. on my set-up i have my hard drive, dvd drive & cd-rw all set as master on a different ide slot and if i decided to add a dvd burner i could make that a master a well. with certain drives making it a slave can slow them down when you use them at the same time. if you disable the raid those ide slots won't work.

i agree w/freeing resources up and most of the onboard sound and video are not that great but things like lan and raid are very usefull.

 

[logic7]

right now gigabit lan is useless for me. I have cable and, while fast, it's not even close to 10Mb. Transfers between my PC's are sufficiently fast across my 100Mb switch, so I have no pressing need for gigabit.

RAID - If I were running a heavy transaction server, I'd look into RAID, but I'd look at the superior U160 or U320 SCSI RAID solutions. If you're gonna do it, might as well do it right.

Detroit Techno
http://allways.nu
http://www.geocities.com/labwerx

 

[SoDNighthawk]

Athalus is correct about the onboard LAN I like them and they are integrated into the main board and that has to be better then plugging in a PCI card to do the same job and he was right about the overall performance the onboard provides.

In all other respects I believe what you said in the start of this post, it would be much appreciated to have a main board without any built in crap we have to disable in the BIOS.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Liquid
2x512 KinstonHyperX PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9@80Gig
SONY CD 52x
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x

 

[Crashman]

No, the only way to get faster-than-PCI performance from LAN right now is with a board that uses an Intel chipset with Intel controller and CSA bus. Every other onboard solution is PCI.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>