Rant : the lack of logic in progress

[Belgianblue]

Just my rant, please ignore if you are not in the mood for senseless dribble

Today as I got to thinking over the next system I'm building, I started noticing all the little annoying things about the newest progressions in hardware-land. They call it progress, and we are all excited to have new things to play with and discuss (or we wouldn't be at THG several hours each day ) but at what cost ? And aren't these manufacturers looking over some really easy to solve issues ?

SLI and MVP : Oh yey, 20-100% more graphic power without having to wait for the next major GPU or the upgrade to more DDR3 on mainstream cards. What's not to like ? Well I for one detest the fact that putting in two giant chunks of hardware like video cards basically takes up all the place on the mobo and leaves absolutely no room for other expansions ! That's if the Mobo manufacturere even felt lik putting in a usable PCI slot for those people who have more than just their video-cards to add. If I choose for SLI I have nowhere to stock soundcards, TV-tuners or other expansion cards. Try finding an SLI board with 4 PCI's, and if you do, good luck using them all, they will likely be obstructed by the video card. Easy solution for sure, go with the dual core strategy, and put the two GPU's on one card. Asus came out with one (En6800 Ultra Dual). Except the thing looks big enough to swallow my case, is probabaly not very productive as far as keeping the case cool, and above all, one is to ask ones self, won't two GPU's using only one 16x PCIe slot instead of two inhibit performance ? Can't someone for once come up with like a 30x PCIe slot and a decent sized Dual GPU card ? This one bothers me greatly because I'm forced to choose between a compact system with great graphics or an excellent system with lesser graphics.

And what's with this PCIe stuff anyway ? Give me back my PCI slots !!! What the hell am I going to do with 1x and 4x slots ? Are there actually any type of expansion cards that actually use these ? That's not a rhetorical question, I'm actually curious. And what type of expansion cards would be worth buying in the future that would sport these. I'm not in the market for a new TV tuner, and my audio cards won't need upgrading til X-Fi gets affordable. Did every Mobo maker using PCIe 16x suddenly forget that all existing expansion cards use PCI ?

As far as cases I can't seem to find anything decent at all, unless it comes from some obscure brand. I spend days on end scouting cases that have enough bays, slots for brackets, HD space AND look good and are well suited for modding. Once in a while I find one. If I do, you can bet you can't get that product in my country. I mean is every single casemodder content with 2HD's and 4 5.25 bays ?

And what about the number of slots for brackets ? No case seems to sport more than 7 or so. Just like most Mobo support more than 7 expansions slots. But what about brackets that don't require expansion slots ? or simply being able to make an opening for wiring in the back ? And why do Mobo's only have a maximum of 7 expansion slots ? And most newer Mobo's only 3-5 useable slots ?

Why is every Mobo trying to sport two SATA controllers to connect 6-8 HD's if there isn't a single PSU that directly supports more than 4 SATA connections ?

Why is it that every PSU or Mobo or really any piece of hardware that needs connections does not come standard with all the needed or desired cables ? Why is this rarely mentioned on the box ? Why do I have to wait until I purchase a product and read the manual to find out that more than half the necessary cables are "optional" requiring one or more extra trips (and extra cash) to obtain.

I can think of more stuff to rant about, but I'll end it here. For those brave enough, or bored enough to read this, comments and additional rants more than welcome.

 

[Crashman]

And I bet you thought those were rhetorical questions...I have the answers!

Back in the days of AT, there were 8 slots. ATX moved the CPU, RAM, and ports to the top of the board, by extending the board, so they wouldn't interfere with card installation. And someone thought "Hey, with the ports all on the board, we don't need as many slots!" Fact is, most AT boards had 5-7 usable slots and the rest of the places were unused/used by other circuits.

Now 7 slots isn't such a bad thing, but sites like Anandtech noticed some companies moving the AGP slot DOWN one position. And these sites PRAISED that move, because it left more room for the lower memory clips! Now, a few board makers left the slot at the uppermost position and tried moving the RAM upward towards the edge of the board, but were not praised for their "innovation", so buyers listened to Anandtech and the like, buying boards with the AGP slot moved downward.

Onboard LAN is one major reason why people didn't mind being reduced from 6 to 5 PCI slots. But most of us didn't use the top PCI slot because it interfered with card cooling. So that left us with 4, rather than 5 slots. Because reviewers use very few cards when testing a system, the problem rarely gets any attention in reviews.

So now, why not put a few bracket holder slots in the back of the case, where they couldn't be used by PCI cards but could still be used for breakout connectors? Laziness and lack of demand. I always thought it would be a GREAT idea, but there aren't enough of me to make a dent in sales.

As for the non-rhetorical part, there have to be MILLIONS of PCIe slot boards IN USE before most companies will bother to make cards for them. ATI's Theater 550 chip was designed to work with both versions, so the only reason there aren't any Theater 550 PCIe cards is that the producers are waiting on demand. Now there aren't enough buyers like YOU to go around!

Now, most people DON'T WANT a bunch of bays. They only WANT 1 3.5" external and 2-3 5.25" external bays. You see, unused bays are ugly compared to the rest of the face panel. I have an Opus MT200 case with 6 big and 2 small external bays and love it. But there aren't enough consumers like US to go around.

Why support so many SATA drives? A few SATA drives are available with BOTH types of power connections, you get a choice with those. And most drives that use SATA power will work with 4-pin adapters. Yes, most current SATA drives do NOT use the 3.3v line.

I've usually gotten ALL the cables I needed with my motherboard, INCLUDING SATA power adapters. The only thing "missing" from my Soyo board was a game port header, but I had one laying around, and most people don't want them so Soyo decided to save the money. As for Asus and their audio breakouts, Asus LOVES for you to purchase additional parts, yes, they're making more money off you!

<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>

 

[Belgianblue]

wow, did not know that about the SATA drives. Good news in any case

As for the rest, I don' get it. I thought we were supposed to be moving towards more possibilities, not trading them for other possibilities.

I understand not using slots for more cooling. Heck, on some boards and with some cards its not even an issue of cooling, you simply CAN'T use the slots because they arent spaced far enough. That's my point exactly. Apparently there is enough of a market to start designing micro-ATX, there has to be enough of a market to start designing macro-ATX and using more space. Back in the day you had to use 6-7 slots and stack all your stuff that is now onboard, which left us with less room than we needed (us probably being you and me, the only two people who like to expand :S) So why did anyone think that when they put the LAN onboard, they'd need LESS slots ? Especially with more and more expansion possibilities coming out.

As far as the cases are concerned, both with slots for brackets and with bays, if there are manyfacturers who can afford to produce oddball cases with only 2 bays, SFF crap, cases that don't look like cases where bays are sacrificed for frill (not that I don't like frill), then again, there it can't be that un-lucrative to invest in a case that serves our small corner of the market ? It can be that hard to have a good looking case with MORE bays. I'm not asking for a million, I'm asking instead of 4, to have 5-6 5'25" and to actually have 2 usable external 3.5" (not sacrificed for more HD space) and still be able to use anywhere from 4-8 HD's. So here I am, either forced to go with a really large, ugly server type case (which funnily enough still only has 7 bracket-holders, despite heaps of remaining space at the bottom) which are so heavy even I start sweating (I'm 235 lbs, 6'2 at 6% BF) or to sacrifice the room to have something I can spend some decent time modding with.

Besides, I think the ugly issue is overrated if you take into account that most cases theses days have doors and slide covers that cover the bays, so you can't even see them.

It's frustrating that no one in this industry has even the remotest bit of insight.

 

[Crashman]

Like I said, I use the Opus MT200. It's a short midtower (just over the 17" minimum height for standard layout) and has 6 large and 2 small external bays. It only has room for two internal drives, but that's because standard height only leaves enough room for 4 small and 6 large bays.

And it's fine. I use 4 of the large bays, I could easily make room for 4-5 more hard drives. After all, one of my large bays has a drive rack in it, and 3-bay racks can hold up to 5 drives. So even as I'm throwing "everything but the kitchen sink" in my case, I still have enough room.

But that means I'm still running short on slot space, so I'm firmly behind the concept of putting bracket slots elsewhere on the back of the case.

You know what I'd like to see? Slot brackets on FRONT of the case. With front slot brackets, I could move my gameport and several additional I/O ports to the front of the case rather than occupy the limitted and hard-to-reach slots on the rear.

<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>