Last month, we took you deep into the hidden recesses of Intel’s Hawthorn Farm facility, where the company’s enthusiast motherboards are designed and refined. On our way out of the building, we walked down a long hallway that ends with the metal detector gate one passes through when entering the building. This hallway is lined with dozens of mounted, framed motherboards—a veritable walk-through museum documenting Intel’s many years of motherboard innovation.
As tech enthusiasts, we tend to be amnesiacs. There’s just so much good stuff to focus on now, and even better stuff coming soon, that we forget where we’ve been and the massive effort that went into moving through those stages. Walking this hallway, we felt a bit like archeologists or perhaps sudden visitors to the Galapagos Islands, granted a rare glimpse at the sweep of natural evolution. Some fits of creativity grew into the technologies we have today. Others blossomed for a moment and died ingloriously.
At the end of our last visit, we got about half-way down this hallway, then stalled in our tracks. After nearly two decades in the hardware business, it was impossible not to stop at each frame with a “I remember that!” or a “Oh, what was that called again?!” We wanted to stay for hours. So on a return visit with a camera and tripod, we did. Sure, we had to shoot the boards under poor lighting and through the high-glare glass of their frames, but it turned out well in the end.
What follows are our picks for the best dozen of the mobo brood, the ones that stood out as having exceptional historical significance. We had a blast taking this walk down memory lane and rediscovering our roots. Hopefully, you will, too.
For you trivia buffs, the original Batman TV series debuted in 1966. Twenty-seven years later, Intel delivered the “Batman” motherboard, the first commercial release from the company’s motherboard group. Prior to Batman, Intel had merely produced reference boards for major OEMs and MNCs (multi-national corporations). The trouble was that the CPU group would launch a chip but there were no motherboards on the market to support it. Intel was stuck in a chicken-and-egg conundrum, and the best solution was to release both items together. Marketing-speak for this is “time to market,” or TTM. Batman was Intel’s first TTM board, and it was meant to accelerate the adoption of Pentium.
Those rectangular chips near the CPU socket are cache, because L2 had yet to be integrated into the processor. And the big, square chips? No, those aren’t part of the chipset. They’re for I/O.
One thing you’ll notice on the really old boards is that some of the SIMM slots closer to the board edge are angled 45 degrees. This was due to chassis height restrictions for items like the hard drive or power supply. The real nugget here is the “OverDrive Ready” stamp on the CPU socket (Socket 4), a feature so ancient that it stumped our first set of Intel engineers. Socket 4 supported a 5V connection and only worked with the Pentium 60 and 66 chips. Socket 5 (3.3V) would later support the Pentium 75 to 133 and used staggered pin rows. The Pentium OverDrive chip used a clock doubler to take the speed to 120 or 133 MHz on Socket 4 systems. The net result was slower than a true 120 or 133 MHz product, but it was the poor man’s answer to a system upgrade. There were also OverDrive chips for Socket 5, Pentium Pro, and, most famously, the 486, which allowed a Pentium core to run on a 486 platform with somewhat hit and miss results.
In 1993, Bill Clinton became President, CERN unleashed the World Wide Web, and motherboards integrated practically nothing. That’s right—the only I/O integrated on Batman is a couple of PS/2 ports. If you wanted to add audio, you could use one of those ISA buses for something like a Sound Blaster Pro. That monster-sized Dallas DS1887 real-time clock could select between Motorola and Intel bus timing. (Motorola timing? Chalk that one up to the round file of history.)
By September of 1994, Intel was ready to bail on the 5V Pentium plan. The Plato motherboard jumped to Socket 5 while preserving many of Batman’s quirks. You still only find PS/2 on the back. There’s 256KB of cache mounted on the PCB—a laughable amount compared to the several megabytes now baked into modern CPUs—and the board could support system memory configurations up to 128 MB across two banks. Plato supported Pentium 75 or 90 chips, and there was a jumper on the motherboard (JP7) you had to set in order to enable the correct processor.
Gateway came out with an OEM version of Plato called Neptune, which just makes you wonder if someone in the company erroneously thought the name was Pluto and wanted to be one planet closer to Earth.
The Plato motherboard was famous within Intel for being the first model to sell over one million units for the company. It was also a sign of the times that boards should be loaded with as many slots as possible—five ISA and three PCI in this case. Maximum expansion capability, summed up by the phrase “slots and watts,” was both a sign of coolness as well as a practical necessity since practically nothing was built into the board. Not how close together the last PCI slot is to the ISA slot on the board’s edge. This was one of the first instances of a shared slot design, in which either slot could make use of one opening in the chassis’s rear.
Other curiosities: Notice how there are no plastic walls around the floppy and hard disk headers on Plato, although there were on Batman? This is an odd step backward since it was all too easy to bend pins during cable attachment and removal. Enough bending and you’d snap a pin or two clean off. And do you see that power connector between the fourth ISA and first PCI slots? Not even the oldest of the Intel old timers helping us could remember what that was for. Bonus kudos to anyone who can solve the mystery in our feedback section.
By the beginning of 1996, the industry was in clear need of a return to the simple form factors that made AT and Baby AT desktops so easy to work with, only without AT’s legacy technologies. Intel had released the first specification for ATX in 1995, and Thor was the first Intel board to use the new form factor. While ATX has been updated a few times, the form factor, along with its microATX derivative, still remains the dominant format used in PCs today.
Thor featured a maximum bus speed of 66 MHz for Socket 7 Pentiums and up to 128MB of Extended Data-Out (EDO) SIMM memory. EDO marked a 10% to 15% improvement over the prior Fast Page Memory technology by allowing the memory controller to start a new column address instruction while concurrently reading a different address—multitasking. Of course, this required support in the chipset, and Thor’s Triton (430FX) core logic proved to be immensely popular and really established Intel as a leading chipset company. Triton also supported PCI level 2.0 and pipelined burst cache.
You’ll notice several blank spots on this Thor model. That’s because it was common for Intel, then as now, to produce reference designs that OEMs could then customize to taste. Not everyone needed an extra ISA slot or additional on-board memory.
There are a lot of nifty tidbits on this board. The Socket 7 design was novel, not only because it provided split rail voltage—what? over 10 years before AMD made a fuss about Barcelona’s split rail power?—but it was also backward compatible with Socket 5 CPUs. Imagine that, a backward compatible CPU socket. Better yet, Socket 7 worked with processors from AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and others. True, friendly, open craziness. No wonder it didn’t last. And hey, believe it or not, those are Sony 32-bit SRAM chips sitting alongside the CPU socket.
Looking behind the board, it’s a little miracle--the birth of motherboard integration. Forget those Super I/O cards. Now we have integrated serial, parallel, and game ports. Remember 15-pin game ports for joysticks (support for these disappeared under Windows Vista)? Under the game port, behold—three audio jacks fueled by a Crystal Semiconductor ASIC mounted under the third and fourth PCI slots. In the bottom-right of the image below, you can also see the four-wire audio header for connecting to the CD-ROM so systems could play music discs.
You’d think that our first Intel board code-named for a place might have been Santa Clara, Hillsboro, Portland, or some other major Intel location. But no. The first quarter of 1998 brought us Seattle, Intel’s first board to make it to a 100 MHz front-side bus (FSB). This was also the company’s time-to-market board for supporting the Pentium II launch. Hmmm, where is that CPU socket? Oh, right—there wasn’t one! Instead, we had the Slot 1 design supporting processor cartridge packages often informally known as “candy bars.” Launch speeds of the 100 MHz bus parts were 350 and 400 MHz.
Compared with Thor, you can see that Seattle is a cleaner board. A lot of the extra and oversized chips are vanishing. All of those real estate-sucking memory chips are gone, for instance, although 512KB of L2 cache is still on the motherboard, and large capacitors are starting to crop up like mushrooms around the CPU slot. Note again that we have a shared PCI/ISA slot, this time second in from the far edge.
Integration takes another hop on Seattle, this time in the form of a pair of USB ports, so new at this time that hardly any devices were available to use them. The USB functionality derived from the PIIX4E southbridge controller. Even more significant was the 440BX northbridge, which was the second from Intel to support Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). The AGP slot is peeking out to the left of the Slot 1 interface.
AGP marked a quantum leap beyond graphics utilizing the shared PCI bus. Seattle supported AGP at 66 and 133 MHz speeds. To modern eyes, the idea of debuting a new graphics technology on a business platform seems backwards. Times have changed.
Only one month after Seattle’s arrival, Intel took the 66/100MHz FSB Pentium II in a different direction. The Juneau motherboard is the only product in this roundup to use the NLX form factor. NLX was a bona fide industry standard and perhaps the industry’s first widespread attempt at the small form factor concept. The former LPX design lacked NLX’s component interchangeability. Unlike today’s small form factor standards, though, NLX relied on either a three-slot or four-slot riser card for ISA and PCI slot expansion. The riser plugged into the edge connector along the side of the motherboard, turning the board into an L-shape. This is why you only see two slots on the riser-less Juneau. One was for the Pentium II cartridge (that black bar was a bracket for securing the CPU heatsink), and the other was for AGP 2x cards.
In 1998, slimline systems, the dominant application for small form factor, were primarily a corporate phenomenon. SFF was a long way from taking hold in the consumer world. And because mainstream corporate boxes could be even more price sensitive than consumer desktops, the push for integration was even more paramount. This is why Juneau has integrated 10/100 Ethernet as well as an onboard ATI RAGE Pro Turbo 64-bit AGP chip, a pretty slick feature in those days.
There’s no game port—another business-oriented tell-tale—but VGA, audio (including a front panel audio header), and a single USB port are all splashed across the back edge in seemingly random order.
Vancouver is a small city, just outside of Portland, OR, and across the Columbia River in Washington. The commute to Intel’s facilities in Hillsboro from Vancouver was atrocious in 1999 (and hasn’t improved any since). One might even call it overextending. Perhaps this was the psychic backdrop behind the Vancouver motherboard, better known as the VC820, which was Intel’s first board to use Rambus DRAM, or RDRAM. Suffice it to say here that RDRAM may be the single worst black eye Intel ever suffered in its motherboard division.
Intel and Rambus became financially entangled in 1996, and not long thereafter Intel announced that it would standardize on the Rambus memory interface. The move was a bit like announcing in 2009 that all cars need to be electric by 2012, only electric cars cost more, run slower, can’t travel as far, and are way more expensive to repair—oh, and you have to consume as many fossil fuels as with gas cars in order to make the electricity. RDRAM looked spiffy on paper, but the technology underperformed DDR and carried a stiff price premium. It made no sense outside of workstation platforms. AMD couldn’t have asked for a better early Christmas present. The public outcry was intense, and RDRAM died a remarkably premature death.
Sorry, we were talking about motherboards. Aside from RDRAM, and the ridiculous need for what were essentially electrical dummy modules called CRIMMs if you only wanted to run a single memory stick, Vancouver wasn’t a bad product. The AGP slot supported up to 4x cards.
There were four dual-color diagnostic LEDs on the back for diagnostics, a surprising twist that foreshadowed future enthusiast leanings. The motherboard and its 820 chipset could run both Pentium II and Pentium III processors with host bus speeds of 100 or 133 MHz.
Vancouver also features a new slot called the audio/modem riser, or AMR. This was a slick cost-cutting maneuver by which manufacturers could create one analog card for functions such as modem communication or audio and get that daughter card FCC certified. This way, analog I/O could be updated without the complexity or expense of updating the motherboard and having to run it through the FCC again. The board still features a game port on the back panel. The only bit of design weirdness we see here is in the bracketed front panel I/O header (itself a pretty fresh PC concept) below the floppy and PATA ports. Look closely and you’ll see that the I/O bracket is offset from the disk brackets by a fraction of an inch. This wasn’t a flub. The feature outlines screened on the board show the same thing—an unusual bit of aesthetic oversight for Intel. Another interesting point is the outline screen for the AGP locking tab, which was an option not present on this reference board. The view was that the latch was an additional expense at a time when not everyone cared about securing the graphics card.
Give Intel credit for fessing up to its mistakes. A year after the RDRAM debacle, we had the Pentium III- and Celeron-based Willow Springs 2, the D810EWS-2, and memory support for up to 512MB of plain ol’ 100 MHz, 168-pin DIMMs. Front-side bus support spanned 100/133 MHz for the P3 and 66 MHz for Celeron. Intel likes to talk about how Willow Springs 2 is significant because it was the company’s first motherboard to be designed in Kulim, Malaysia, at the sister design site to the Hawthorn Farm campus in Oregon. We see it as more significant for its microATX form factor. True, microATX arrived at the end of 1997, well before WS2, but this board was key in popularizing the 9.6" x 9.6" format. It also marked the melting away of the candy bar slot and the return of the socket. Not least of all, Willow Springs 2 marked Intel’s move away from the “superboard” concept. No longer would one board design be adapted for all market segments. Willow Springs 2 was clearly built for the mainstream consumer while Garibaldi (see later) was aimed at the high-end.
Apparently, Intel also melted away both ISA and AGP support on this board, leaving only four PCI slots. With no LAN port and a more compact form factor, Willow Springs 2 was making a new play for the consumer market based on integration-driven affordability. One could opt for the inexpensive Celeron, you had on-board Crystal audio, and VGA output from the 810E chipset’s integrated graphics. The newly coined “Graphics Media Controller Hub” featured “vivid 2D and 3D graphics,” “soft DVD MPEG-2 playback,” and “Linux Operating System support.” Woooo. Big stuff back then, even if it did set a multi-year precedent for Intel’s integrated graphics being underwhelming to all but business users.
Check out the introduction of PC 99 color coding on the I/O ports. PC 97, the initial spec of the PC System Design Guide from Microsoft and Intel, mandated that PS/2 mouse ports would be green and PS/2 keyboard ports purple. This was to keep people from plugging the wrong device into the wrong port. PC 99 expanded this with the colors you now see on legacy I/O ports, including blue VGA ports and the multifarious audio jacks.
You’re probably wondering about the northbridge being rotated 45 degrees. No, this isn’t some odd harbinger of the defunct BTX form factor—not directly, anyway. There are simply some engineering cases in which the rotation helps simplify and shorten the length of the trace break-outs from the northbridge to the front-side bus, memory, hublink to the southbridge, and expansion slots. Because the mounting holes remain unchanged, there’s no violation of the ATX/microATX form factor.
Garibaldi is a tiny town on the Oregon coast most notable for a picturesque grain silo and its proximity to Tillamook, home of the Northwest’s top cheese factory. As far as we can tell, there isn’t the slightest thematic connection with the Garibaldi motherboard (D850GB), Intel’s first recognition of the fledgling gamer market. Maybe one of the engineers has a summer home there.
Garibaldi was a full ATX workstation board built for the Pentium 4 with a 400 MHz front-side bus. The high-end slant is evidenced by the presence of a 50W AGP Pro 50 (4x) slot. At the time, Pro 50 cards ran about $1,500 a pop—not so different in concept from stocking your box with 3- or 4-way SLI today. In 2001, this was also one of Intel’s last gasps with RDRAM, and Garibaldi could take up to 2GB of it. You see several signs of mounting power here. Check out the new ATX12V connector by the CPU socket, the auxiliary power connector slammed awkwardly alongside the disk headers, and the northbridge heatsink—the first Intel chipset cooler, near as we can tell.
Why the need for a northbridge cooler? It could have something to do with the fact that Garibaldi introduced Intel’s BIOS “burn-in mode,” a hilarious euphemism when you consider that this model allowed for overclocking up to only 4 percent. Still, compared to Intel’s former Thou Shalt Not Alter The Frequency commandment, this was a critical step.
Other Garibaldi innovations included APM and ACPI power management interfaces as well as inclusion of a communications and network riser (CNR) slot, the successor to the old AMR. Garibaldi was also the world’s first board to feature USB 2.0.
If Garibaldi dabbled with the idea of courting enthusiasts, the Blue Mountain board (D845EBT) of Q4 2002 finally took matters seriously. The 845PE chipset brought a 533 MHz FSB to the Pentium 4 desktop. Remember the skyrocketing thermal envelopes of Netburst architecture, set on a collision course for 150W TDPs (before overclocking)? Such heat required hardcore cooling, hence the reinforced heatsink retention bracket around the CPU socket, and we finally see Intel starting to experiment with sexier northbridge heatsinks. With five PCI slots and a 4x AGP, plus support for six USB 2.0 ports, Blue Mountain is starting to look downright modern, although only having two memory slots seems a bit confining. Then again, with support for either single- or double-sided DDR DIMMs, the board could take up to 2GB of system memory.
Blue Mountain marks Intel’s first black PCB, and sources tell us that nailing this exact shade of black on every Extreme Edition board is no small feat. So-called black PCBs often turn out any number of shades, including brownish. Intel wanted its high-end consumer boards to be about an experience, not just speed, which is why you see a lot more attention paid to media features. The Analog Devices audio codec provided for 5.1 audio (although, strangely, there was also a 2-channel Blue Mountain variant), and we now see both coax and optical SPDIF ports as well as 10/100 Ethernet.
Only the outline remains of what was once the CNR slot. This was also Intel’s first foray into internal SATA ports courtesy of a discrete Silicon Image controller. While Intel had yet to break its motherboard family out into the segment-oriented groups we see today, Blue Mountain essentially founded the Extreme series and set the precedent for the company’s ongoing shift to competing for the market’s highest-end clientele, not just the masses of business buyers.
By 2006, the whole simultaneous time-to-market launch thing was down to a science. The Kentsfield quad-core CPU was arriving with the 975X chipset, and the whole deal would run on the D975XBX2 motherboard, more fondly known as BadAxe 2. This was Intel’s first official “high-end desktop gaming system” platform. Front-side bus speeds now reached 1066 MHz. Dig those flaming blue heatsinks on the power circuitry. Additional traces built into the underside of the PCB served to turn the board itself into a heatsink, relieving some of the need to add extra cooling on top. Even the ICH7R southbridge had a heatsink, and virtually all of Intel’s old overclocking limitations (save only for overvoltaging the processor) were swept away. The company even went so far as to build in a BIOS recovery feature to restore the system to default settings after two failed POST attempts—a tacit admission of being OK with tweaker naughtiness.
Four 800 MHz DDR2 DIMMs could provide up to 8GB of system memory, and BadAxe 2 would even take ECC modules, reflecting an interesting flip-flop. Only a few years before, workstation boards were targeted at consumers as an afterthought. Now, with BadAxe 2, we had a consumer board that could also serve workstation buyers. You could tell because there were three PCI Express (Gen 1) slots. Intel only supported ATI CrossFire, so only two of the slots could bond graphics cards via x8 connections. However, if you had only one graphics card, it could run at a full x16.
With the BadAxe 2, Intel switched from using Silicon Image SATA RAID controller to a Marvell chip. This provided for RAID across four drives, plus you could RAID another four drives through the ICH7R southbridge. Basic RAID had been supported for a long time, but these changes reflect the times, with large-capacity, cheap storage becoming commonplace and high-end users wanting to protect their mushrooming media collections. Another tell-tale of changing times, BadAxe 2 also integrated an eSATA port and a Gigabit Ethernet controller. The age of high-def had arrived.
Welcome to the present. You know times are weird when Intel not only adopts a form factor created by one-time rival VIA Technologies but builds a major marketing campaign around it. Little Falls (D945GCLF) was the Q4 2008 time-to-market board behind not only Intel’s official embracement of Mini-ITX but also the new Atom processor. While it’s slightly ironic that Intel paired the 4W Atom with the much more power-hungry 945 chipset as part of a green/energy savings play, Little Falls is less about eco-friendliness and more about price. You can even read it in the plaque mounted under this reference board. Little Falls is a “nettop” product meant to address the “sub-value segment” and reach “the next billion users.”
Honestly, nettop strikes us as one of those hopelessly kitsch marketing terms that tries to make you think of cool things like the Net and laptops but doesn’t really say anything sensible. A laptop is small enough to sit on top of your lap. A netbook is a notebook designed principally for surfing the Net. What’s a nettop? Seriously. Who thinks of this stuff?
Little Falls and its planned successors are Celeron killers, so pay your last respects soon. This platform is all about price. You can find a D945GCLF today for under $80, which is wicked cheap for a board and CPU. The processor is hard-mounted to the board, alleviating the cost of the socket. There’s only one DDR2 slot (533 MHz) and one PCI slot. Graphics are built in, as is 6-channel audio support and S-Video output. When we asked why the northbridge needs such a relatively big heatsink, especially one with an active fan, Intel admitted that the fan had been a source of considerable debate. Apparently, there’s one variant model that omits the fan, but this requires a case with sufficient cooling, and when you’re going for rock bottom system prices, the cases don’t exactly prioritize highly engineered airflow.
Can Little Falls open the door to another billion PC users? In concept, maybe. The single-core Atom is pretty lackluster by desktop standards, but newer multi-core evolutions will remedy this and provide for a decent PC that costs less than $200 or possibly even $150. That could be enough to open up the emerging markets around the world as well as satisfy domestic demand for third and fourth PCs, such as for little kids or the laid off in-laws living in your garage.
The trouble with taking this trip down Motherboard Memory Lane chronologically is that we come to the coolest, most groundbreaking product last, but it arrived only a couple of quarters ago, and you’ve probably seen coverage of it here on Tom’s (and everywhere else) already. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t wrap up with Skulltrail (D5400XS).
Dual-processor (2P) graphics workstations are common in the commercial world, where hours saved on a high-load job can mean tens of thousands of dollars. By the end of 2008, the 5400 was Intel’s flagship workstation chipset, able to run a pair of Socket 771 Xeons on a 1600 MHz bus. But if this platform was so sweet for professionals, why not also for the most elite (and deep-pocketed) gamers? So Intel brought the 5400 chipset over to the Extreme desktop crew, rebadged the Xeon X5482 as the Core 2 Extreme QX9775, took off all the overclocking restraints, and created a monster. Sure, 800 MHz FB-DIMMs had to come along for the ride, but that seems a small price for having your choice of SLI or CrossFireX on a single motherboard. This is the first time Intel has paid the royalty for planting SLI on its boards. Moreover, a pair of nForce 100 bridge chips split the 32 lanes of PCI Express 1.1 coming off the northbridge into four x8 connections, one for each blue graphics slot. These chips hide under the black fan shroud above the PCIe and two PCI slots. With quad-card support still on the horizon, perhaps Intel felt it was OK to set up the slot spacing such that only three double-wide cards could be used.
Skulltrail made such a splash that it was Intel’s first motherboard to be featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal--no, not in an advertisement. If you have to ask how much power Skulltrail draws, this isn’t the platform for you, although Intel advises at least a 1,000W power supply. Suffice it to say that there are seven fan headers on the board, now colored red so you might actually find all of them. Interestingly, the Extended ATX board drops having a discrete RAID controller and settles for six SATA ports from the 6321ESB southbridge. All of the other audio amenities you’d expect are present, fueled by the impressive Sigmatel STAC9274 codec. Intel also adds Gigabit Ethernet, two eSATA ports, and support for two 1394a and 10 USB 2.0 ports. Long overdue, the diagnostic LEDs of old now return in the form of an alphanumeric Port 80 readout by the SATA ports. Skulltrail also catches up with other hobbyist boards by adding on-board power and reset buttons.
Skulltrail isn’t perfect. It’s Achilles heel is probably its reliance on FB-DIMMs. However, if Intel continues to pursue bragging rights at the zenith of the gamer market, then a Nehalem-era update should be mind-blowing. In any case, as we look back over 16 years of motherboard evolution, the leaps that Intel has made, and the influence those leaps have had on the entire industry, remain impressive. Sometimes Intel hits a homer. Other times, the boards might be better viewed as...an inspiration for competition. Either way, it’s all good for us.