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Tom's Hardware Visits Intel's Motherboard Team

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  • Tom's Hardware
  • Intel
  • Motherboards
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June 17, 2011 9:30:03 AM

We first covered Intel's Hawthorn Farm campus two years ago. A return visit with a video camera gives us the opportunity to film inside and ask some new questions about the company's efforts to design more enthusiast-oriented motherboards.

Tom's Hardware Visits Intel's Motherboard Team : Read more

More about : tom hardware visits intel motherboard team

June 17, 2011 9:58:19 AM

first!
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June 17, 2011 10:09:28 AM

great to hear. my P3 intel board was crazy stable. i have stuck with asus since the P4 era but ill turn some of my attention back to intel now.
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Related resources
June 17, 2011 10:24:50 AM

I just got a new DP67BGb3 and I'm diggin it. I had a great P4 Intel board, the D865PERL with sata, optical and coaxial digital audio out, and several other nice features -- except for overclocking. The board is still good 8 years later. The DP67BG feels like more of a successor to that, except for the overclocking and the Extreme Skull (which is actually kind cool -- I likes it). Some of the early criticisms of the board in January are no longer valid (like cold boot problems with 1600mhz ect). I very much appreciate the care and thought Intel put into the board and hope that they keep up the high level of excellence as represented by the DX58SO2 and DP67BG.
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June 17, 2011 11:03:04 AM

I think the multi phased(8+) motherboards is more about marketing than a stability thing, we(the normal consumer) tend go for motherboards with many phases in the belief that their better than one with few phases.

Intel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.
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June 17, 2011 11:37:26 AM

does that mean the 24 phase Gigabyte boards are compensating for a sh*t design ;) 
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June 17, 2011 11:58:39 AM

ivaroeines...Intel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.


yeah pretty cool ppl...i remember reading that they entered the SSD market just for the sake of improving SSDs...respect these guys a lot, really...

greghome...never had a Intel branded board fail in 10 years


neither have I...very stable products...
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a b å Intel
a c 150 V Motherboard
June 17, 2011 12:45:01 PM

ivaroeinesI think the multi phased(8+) motherboards is more about marketing than a stability thing, we(the normal consumer) tend go for motherboards with many phases in the belief that their better than one with few phases.

Once you get past 3-4 phases, I agree. Two few phases doing too much work (including the poor balancing of many phases that Intel mentions) could cause failures. Varying the number of operating phases based on load does apparently yield some energy savings, although that shouldn't take more than 4-6 to implement either.
ivaroeinesIntel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.

That IS how Intel competes; they just need to do a better job of letting people know that. Read the comments here though to see word-of-mouth at work; I'll add my agreement that the Intel boards I've owned have been very stable.
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June 17, 2011 1:13:16 PM

Surprised Tom's would post this after that embarrassing advertorial on Intel motherboards.
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June 17, 2011 1:51:50 PM

I can't believe how boring this article is, or better said the videos.
PS: the videos load fast, i click play and after 1 second when all of the commercials are loaded the video resets and i have to click play again..
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-11
June 17, 2011 2:13:57 PM

My last motherboard was an integrated 720p HD Video motherboard. It works great in dual display so we can watch Korean historical videos online. I have gotten to the point where almost no american TV is worth watching. My biggest problem is Microsoft operating systems and IE being a substandard video blocking product.
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June 17, 2011 2:23:52 PM

I think lately Intel has done a fairly good job at competing. Even though they have no real competition from AMD, they keep reinventing the wheel and manage to stay so far ahead of AMD that I dont think AMD will ever catch up at this point. I dont really see the big advantage to overclocking anyway. In fact it is overclockers that are pushing up prices for the rest of us. The strange thing is it is overclocking that also makes better standard products available. If it was not for overclockers trying to RMA all the products they destroy, computer parts would be less expensive for everyone else.
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June 17, 2011 3:36:13 PM

Articles such as this make me show more respect towards the work the companies (in this case, Intel) put into products they sell.

Very nice, I like.
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June 17, 2011 4:18:07 PM

fball922Surprised Tom's would post this after that embarrassing advertorial on Intel motherboards.


This story--an editorial opportunity--had nothing to do with the advertorial that went up. I've already expressed my disagreement with the fact that was even posted to \articles\ (even though it's clearly labeled as a sponsored piece).
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a b V Motherboard
June 17, 2011 4:29:40 PM

ceh4702My last motherboard was an integrated 720p HD Video motherboard. It works great in dual display so we can watch Korean historical videos online. I have gotten to the point where almost no american TV is worth watching. My biggest problem is Microsoft operating systems and IE being a substandard video blocking product.


There are American-made TVs? ;) 


Back on subject - getting to visit Intel's lab must be just wholly awesome. Some of my professors at Purdue worked with them on some research a little while back, and I think that's how they're developing the 22nm and smaller transistors.
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June 17, 2011 5:04:50 PM

boiler1990There are American-made TVs? Back on subject - getting to visit Intel's lab must be just wholly awesome. Some of my professors at Purdue worked with them on some research a little while back, and I think that's how they're developing the 22nm and smaller transistors.

They've had these transistors in the works for quite a while now, and they successfully made smaller chips by using these transistors...
Onto this article; I personally really liked it, and must confess that I would love to have their job.
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June 17, 2011 7:02:04 PM

So I open the embedded video and it barely loads at 360p on a 22mb broadband connection. I hit the source link to youtube and it istantly fully loaded? Web fail.
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June 17, 2011 7:21:07 PM

On some boards the additional phases is to reduce heat as it is cheaper to add an extra phase than it is to add a heatsink (when you consider pure production cost) The downside is since the phases are not 100% efficient, you increase overall power consumption)

It is also largely marketing. People like higher numbers. To the average user, they may thing "I don't know what that is but this board has more of it than the other board for the same price"

When I get these types of board, I run it without the side panel for the forst few hours while running a CUDA accelerated password cracker (mainly because it maxes the CPU and GPU the entire time and gets hotter temperatures than even prime95)

I then use the thermal probe that came with my multimeter, then place it against each of the phase chips (my msi board had no heatsinks on them)

I then monitor the temperatures, and what I found was that each phase had about the same temperature so the power was being shared evenly, especially with a CPU using well over 140 watts since it is overclocked (Phenom II x4 965 overclocked)

So not sure about all other boards but in my case with the msi board, the crazy amount of phases was to avoid the production cost of adding heatsinks to the phases.
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June 17, 2011 8:19:34 PM

Newb question:

Why does Intel use Prime95 and not IntelBurnTest?

I was told IBT works the cpu harder and produces more heat than Prime95 does, and it even does it faster, completing a pass in under 5 minutes as opposed to P95's hours.

Please enlighten me.
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June 17, 2011 9:10:01 PM

Good question Dj, I'll ask the guys over there about it.
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June 17, 2011 10:27:51 PM

Awesome article... I love the strait from the horse's mouth aspect of it, and not just a second hand overlook. Now can we get the same thing on Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI? Please =) Though this might require quite a bit more traveling than taking a trip to Intel.
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Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
June 18, 2011 12:49:29 AM

Eh... I made it more or less through the first page, where they are using sub-zero cooling and unsustainable voltage to achieve higher overclocking... Revolutionary I tell ya, never been done before...

As a side note: Since Tom's is now ***officially*** sponsored by Intel, can we assume a fair bit of bias in these AMD vs. Intel articles? After many years of trolling about it, I think quite a few people owe me an apology....
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June 18, 2011 1:03:02 AM

harry_palms_jrEh... I made it more or less through the first page, where they are using sub-zero cooling and unsustainable voltage to achieve higher overclocking... Revolutionary I tell ya, never been done before...As a side note: Since Tom's is now ***officially*** sponsored by Intel, can we assume a fair bit of bias in these AMD vs. Intel articles? After many years of trolling about it, I think quite a few people owe me an apology....


Not at all--my editorial department has absolutely nothing to do with any clearly-labeled sponsored content that the sales team involves itself in.

My team continues to work closely with both Intel and AMD (and Nvidia).

Best,
Chris
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June 18, 2011 2:03:35 AM

@ djridonkulus

Simple to answer. How many over clocker's do you see out there claiming world records using IBT??? None I suspect. Intel uses the same tools for those types of numbers that the users are running. Software such as Prime95 can not be accused of being slanted to one platform or the other ( or has not been so far).
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June 18, 2011 3:50:06 AM

if they are so good how come they aren't so popular?
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June 18, 2011 5:43:26 AM

djridonkulusNewb question:Why does Intel use Prime95 and not IntelBurnTest?I was told IBT works the cpu harder and produces more heat than Prime95 does, and it even does it faster, completing a pass in under 5 minutes as opposed to P95's hours.Please enlighten me.


Here's the answer from Intel:

“Prime95 is a pretty straightforward, mainstream application that we use to get a baseline measurement of OC stability that reflects general usage / workloads…when we conduct burn-in testing with OC settings for board stability we defer to Intel’s burn Test utility along with other internal software loading tools to tune the board for maximum performance.”
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June 18, 2011 6:09:23 AM

I want something like Skull Trail in socket 1155 PLEASE! For the love of God and all that's holy, I WANT DUAL SOCKET WITH SLI SUPPORT!
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June 18, 2011 6:11:22 AM

The Greater GoodI want something like Skull Trail in socket 1155 PLEASE! For the love of God and all that's holy, I WANT DUAL SOCKET WITH SLI SUPPORT!

Nice, thanks Chris
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Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
June 18, 2011 6:57:07 PM

Chris: Intel sponsors tomshardware.com, which includes your department. You sound like a politician lying about his bribes by saying "no, that money was a campaign contribution, nothing to do with corruption".

At any rate, a supposedly independent 3rd party hardware review site to be taking any money from Intel, AMD or Nvidia is highly inappropriate, what made the whole racket so successful for so many years was the fact that sites like yours and anandtech were at least pretending to be impartial and independent.
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June 18, 2011 8:13:41 PM

I managed lots of motherboards. Hundreds, and that included many Intel. Except for PCCHIPS, the Intel ones were the worst motherboards I suffered.

The D865GBF model and family were the worst. They had any kind of trouble, from I/O (Sata, IDE, USB), drivers, video and memory compatibility, poor support... Intel motherboards are garbage.
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June 19, 2011 5:06:12 AM

cangeliniHere's the answer from Intel:“Prime95 is a pretty straightforward, mainstream application that we use to get a baseline measurement of OC stability that reflects general usage / workloads…when we conduct burn-in testing with OC settings for board stability we defer to Intel’s burn Test utility along with other internal software loading tools to tune the board for maximum performance.”


So is it safe to say that IBT reflects the absolute worst-case scenario with unrealistic workloads for testing OC stability? I recently OC'd my i7 920 to a conservative 3.6GHz on air topping out at 71 degC at 1.1975V using IBT (as a first time overclocker all I wanted was an extra GHz without stressing the cpu) and I'm wondering now if going by IBT was unnecessary and if I should push harder with Prime95.

Anyways, thanks for the follow up Chris. Keep up the good work!

PS: What did you do to get so many trolls out on this article?
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June 19, 2011 5:57:15 PM

I really liked this article, very interesting to see some of the inner workings of a large first tier company like Intel.

I also liked that we actually hear specifics from actual engineering director of Intel performance boards and not some marketing stiffs POSING as Intel personnel.
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June 19, 2011 11:53:39 PM

Great, except now this gives OEMs even less incentive to improve their cheapo PSUs (the Bestec ones in eMachines are notorious for killing the motherboard WHEN, not if, they die).
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a b V Motherboard
June 20, 2011 10:28:28 PM

greghomeIntel branded motherboards......not the best for enthusiast, but they're stable enough, never had a Intel branded board fail in 10 years


I have ... and just try dealing with them to get a warranty return. Ho! They'll do just about anything to say it was your fault. Not to mention that they have crappy support for anything except basic parts at stock settings. Not buying another Intel mobo in my life after that crappy DP45SG, and incidentally, being that angry with them is why I've used AMD CPUs for the past few machines I built for other people too.
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June 21, 2011 12:58:27 PM

harry_palms_iiiChris: Intel sponsors tomshardware.com, which includes your department. You sound like a politician lying about his bribes by saying "no, that money was a campaign contribution, nothing to do with corruption".At any rate, a supposedly independent 3rd party hardware review site to be taking any money from Intel, AMD or Nvidia is highly inappropriate, what made the whole racket so successful for so many years was the fact that sites like yours and anandtech were at least pretending to be impartial and independent.


Dude, stop crying. Allowing any company to advertise on your site doesn't mean they control your content. This is a logical place for any hardware company to advertise their products since we are their buyers.

o.t. Nice read :) 
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June 23, 2011 1:09:24 AM

Intel makel the best boards anywhere. D815EEA, OR840, SE7525RP2,
D865Perll, D945PLRN, D975XBX2, DP43TF, some SuperMicro- and Tyan- (still in use!) -boards. All never failed and have been sold after 4 years boxed for a good price! To compare ten years ago i had some crappy Asus boards, and with the Intel who runned 4 years daily for 8+ hours i never had any failures or stability issues. Intel does a good job, just my 5 cents
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a c 78 V Motherboard
June 26, 2011 10:16:51 PM

Good read.
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Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
July 6, 2011 9:06:22 AM

Hardware-wise, I've been pretty happy with Intel boards - I like the fact that you can find relatively bare (legacy-free) motherboards with decent components. But the software support on the other hand has always been quite a let-down.

My previous intel board was a DX48BT2 - BIOS sucked (f.e. usb keyboards behind a USB hub simply don't work in the bios and bootloader), no driver support for the IDT-based soundcard, ACPI bugs, etc. On a DG45ID I had to wait for months until they fixed a fan control issue that made it rev up and down all the time.

For our next motherboards, I'll look around for some that can support coreboot - to have a customizable but simple firmware. I'm hoping AMD's support for coreboot will make this a realistic option; but I can't be sure yet.

UEFI just seems like a lot of bells and whistles that will make things even more brittle and bloated. Plus lots of branding and marketing crap.
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