What ever happened to decent Motherboards

By decent I mean just a motherboard. I am currently using an ASUS P4T-E motherboard because it is a solid motherboard and it doesn’t have Audio, Video, Extra Hard Drive Controllers, or anything else. Personally I want to be able to add my own Video Card, Sound Card, and Network Card and don’t want to have to disable ones on the motherboard. I also don’t need the ability to attach 10 IDE devices all I need is one or two fast hard drives and one or two optical drives. It would just be nice to be able to purchase a motherboard and not have to disable multiple items on it.

I really don’t have a specific question with this post I would just like to know if I’m the only person who thinks this way.

Happy Computing!

Onboard components have come a long way. The onboard 7.1 sound on my board is fine. I know onboard audio/video will always be inferior to the real thing, but it's nice to know you can buy a board and be up and running with minimal components, then buy a sound card, vid card, network card,..., whatever when you have the money for it. The onboard stuff doesn't really raise the price that much. As a bonus, if your vid card or something dies, you can use the onboard stuff as a backup until you can get a replacement card.

Well, there are some integrated things that are generally good to have and some that I could do without. I want a good integrated SATA and IDE controller as they are faster than about any add-in card that will fit in a regular consumer-grade board. Ditto with USB, FireWire. Integrated Ethernet can be great if done well as the better PHYs have much better links to the chipset than the PCI that add-in cards use. Again, you can get gigabit NICs, but most are PCI-X and won't fit in most boards.

Audio I can take or leave, but integrated graphics suck. So do chipset fans- you are pretty much forced to spend over $110 or so for a board with passive cooling.