I do really wish motherboard makers got thier prices back down. I remember in the 939 days when you could get a really high end board for ~£110 with the tip-top performers going for ~£150. ~£250 (forgetting skulltrail) is just plain silly!
Man, you guys hit it on the head. Send me your PayPal and I will freaking buy you a drink of your choice.
I remember 250 1:1 on a 2500+ on a Shuttle AN35N Ultra that I vmodded. I remember buying a few 1700+ looking for a JIUHB. I then remember buying 2500+s looking for AIXDA steppings. I remember when the top of the line video card cost 250 and were thought our asses were sore then...
Fast forward, I DO own a 4 card system, without drivers for it to boot, and I'm RMAing a flaky board-a problem I've had more and more recently. Performance boards seem to go fast, if they go at all. My K9A2 Plat ran like a banshee, the three times it loaded Windows. It's now an expensive paperweight. Good thing it's 4 days old...
As far as innovation, check out my project log currently. I'm designing everything myself that can be done myself-blocks, loops, case, all reservoirs/flow balancing, etc. If I can't make it, I'm shelling out the dosh to get the tools or have it done, in one case. Some of us are trying to be innovative, but it gets harder and harder...
Great article. You've made my day brighter knowing I'm in a community of like minds.
actually the quadro doeshave some unique hardware. the FX5600 has 1.5 GB of video mem (2x what an ultra has) and also has unique 2D/3D clipping hardware that allows it to render only certain sections of a frame in directX
still too expensive when 2 ultras are just as good
Great article; when I really got into computers in middle school and high school it was just for fun to push performance since I didn't have a lot of money but plenty of time to mess around with things and get them working. Recently though with the demands of college and knowing in a year I'll be working a full time job with 40-60 hours a week I won't have the same amount of free time. I'll probably end up spending more money because it's not worth it to spend 4-5 hours reading different motherboard reviews to find the trick to overclock and volt mod and I'd rather just have something that does it all for me. I know this isn't the case for everyone but to me it seems a natural progression of the industry.
This whole situation reminds me of a quote from my dad:
Quote:
Change is neither good nor bad; it just is.
Enthusiasts will adapt and so will the market, however long it might take.
Nice read, but .. Was I the only one (looking at the title and indeed the picture) who thought this was going to be about something completely different? :p
As sad as it makes me to read this article I have to agree with all of it, I upgraded my PC recently and was frustrated that I didn't really have a choice in what I wanted to buy, all the motherboard designs are virtually the same with the same performance and the same garish features. What happened to simple and powerful boards which were stable and didn't have a million and one features you'd probably never use. The industry has stagnated into rigid grooves of repetition, almost never bringing in new concepts but just repeating the same old solution because it works, when did the last revolutionary products come out? The motherboard I bought three years ago supported 8gb of RAM had 8 SATA ports and 2 PATA ports and now, I bought a motherboard last week which supports 8gb of RAM, 6 SATA ports, 1 PATA port, virtually the same layout and it cost twice the price of the old one yet the performance increase is about 30 to 40%. So many improvements could be made, EFI, sole use of PCI-E, sole use of SATA but they rather choose the route perceived less risk. If you follow a groove you are less likely to fall over and break your neck. I can't help but draw parallels to the gaming market crash in the 80s, the market is flooded by all the same overpriced goods with nothing standing out from the rest. The world of computing has changed and unfortunately there is very little we can do about it.
I'm not sure what to make of this. When I built my current machine (winter of 05-06) I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly what I wanted and then built it. The result was a machine that was unique to me and one that probably no one else would want. I also know that this box will still be serving me well long after most of the consumer and enthusiest machines of the same generation have been relegated to fileservers and firewalls.
I'll be the first to admit it though, I'm a sucker for obscure hardware. Despite the fact that a single 8800 would give better performance at a lower price, i'm still salicating over wanting a pair of 7950 GX2s. Never mind the fact that they're not that practical, and will unboubtably come with some headaches to get running, I still want them. I have a PCI slot reserved for a Phys-X card some day too.
Where am I going with all this? I'm not evn sure now. Oh yeah, just that the large e-peen is a valid market segment and a lucrative one. So too are the "performance at any cost" and the "out of control overclockers". There is also a market segment for the plain vanilla boards with lots of potential, and I think that segment is being underserved in the current market.
Originally Posted by TomH Nice read, but .. Was I the only one (looking at the title and indeed the picture) who thought this was going to be about something completely different? :p
I dont know, but it was definately the picture that got me to click through, lol, who is it anyway?
I know in the last ten years it's happened with dirtbikes (another hobby of mine). When I was growing up, everyone had one, and when they broke we would fix them, ride them again, fix them, ride them......and we never had any downtime. I remember one time my uncle changed out the engine of his bike in the back of his truck, patched it up with some plumbing putty he had in his truck, and road the rest of the weekend.
Just last weekend I went up riding with a few of my buddies and the scene has completely changed. 10 year olds ride around without knowing even how to start their bikes, everybody have matching gear so when they ride by all I see is green (if they own a Kawasaki) Instead of work trucks and tents everyone has 75-ft triple opening, stretch trailers. And if the bike breaks it doesn't matter because , "Daddy" paid for the extended service plan and he'll be back in an hour with a brand new bike.
To me everything seems to be like this. Hobbies and crafts are less popular because you can buy most anything cheaper than you can make it. Not to mention that everything is a fad. I don't know anymore, I feel like a lone ranger when I ditch my friends to work on my computer case or rework the audio in my car. I guess it all comes down to the has and the has-nots. My parents never really bought me anything that I didn't need so when I want something I try to spend the least amount of money getting it. And if that means spending 2 nights working on an aluminum radiator grill just so I don't have to pay AC Ryan $26+ Shipping for something practically everyone has then so be it. At least mine's one-of-a-kind.
One of my pet peeves is CPU reviews where they use a top end MB to overclock a low end / mid-range CPU and claim what a great overclocker it is. If it requires a $300+ board you'd be better off buying a cheaper board and spending the extra on a higher clocked CPU. Being an enthusiast is about finding that balance - not about buying the top end of everything (or maybe not even the top end of anything).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluephoenix ... the industry is poised for a split between its segments. ... with a third section being joined at the hip with media centers. ...
Not unless they get all the DRM and digital cable / satellite tuner issues sorted. Otherwise that market will die fast :(
Quote:
Originally Posted by Firehed Ambiguity cheesecake? Are you guys that desperate for the cheesecake thing to catch on?
I think they are :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by TomH Nice read, but .. Was I the only one (looking at the title and indeed the picture) who thought this was going to be about something completely different? :p
I too was wondering what the article might be about when I saw the pic. But I think they got it right - marketers are using whatever they can (including sexy images) to get us to buy their brand but the real enthusiast is (/should be) interested in the actual hardware - not the marketing pitch (no matter how good the "software" looks :)).
I think in general it was a good article, one that many of us can empathize with.
But let's face it, many on here are the lemmings who pay the silly money for 'enthusiast' components purely for bragging rights.
Personally, I'm always chasing bang for buck... I've owned an FX5900XT, and GeForce 6600, a Pentium 805, a 7900GTO, an E6600, a P5B Deluxe and a Q6600. Many of us have tried a 2B pencil mod, or use nTune/ATI Tool/Rivatuner and other tools & techniques to make a more modest component perform like it's more expensive 'enthusiast' brethren.
I reckon the major OEM will be reading sites like BT and the other geek fora, but they aren't going to change their habits because too many people are buying the over-specced expensive toys that we are objecting to here.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you agree with Bindi, let your buying habits be the message to the OEMs, and in time they will listen.
The 440BX was the bees knees for it's time. The i815e chipset (particularly the Asus CUSL2) was highly desirable as it was an overclocking monster. It'd easily (if the cpu could cope) take a 700Mhz P3 and clock the sh*t out of it to over the 1GHz mark. That was the main excitement, back in the day. Getting to and surpassing that 1GHz barrier. Once that had been done, water cooling and case mods sprang up and tbh, apart from making things go faster (Intel dominating, then AMD, then Intel again), there's been no real fuss or excitement (apart from some eggs being fried and a couple of G-nome's mods).
one of the best reads in a long time. made me think. well you can surely tell i'm a sort-of old day enthusiast (tho rather young, its much more interesting doing it old way!)
This article really speaks to me even though im too young (19, very close to 20) to fully appreciate all the references.
But I agree about the enthusiast being the one who buys the cheapest he/she can and turns it into a machine with the power of one that cost twice or thrice the price.
My current system I knew exactly what I was after, so intead of buying that I bought the lowest I could that would overclock to the same specs, obviously not quite as old school as some manual modding, but what have I really got to work with now.
i am glad i am not the only person who thinks that the market is ridiculously over saturated with the same stupid junk, just with a copper fan instead of a aluminum fan, or "item b has feature a, but not feature c, but item a has all these features, but not this one, etc"
i shouldnt have to spent a month of research to decide what motherboard i want.. choices are good, but too many choices leaves people that dont spend 8hrs a day following the hardware scene a little out in the dust.
and, about the branding of stuff... i HATE that ... that whole fatal1ty series is JUNK... its like they take a perfectly crappy device, put more crap on it, paint it red, add some obnoxious LEDs, put that idiot's tag on it, and sell it for 25% more than the original product is... its not a good product to begin with, so the end product ends up being worse...
i dont see the point in spending twice the amount of money for things on my bios that i will never use... enthusiast boards are typically used for maybe a month at a time... these boards dont need cat5 cable testers built into them, they need the essentials for what they are designed for.
"degree plagues"... Did I miss my chance to take a BSc in Apocalypse Studies perhaps? Maybe its just a typo, I'll check the UCAS site later.
The current state of the market does make you wish there was something simple yet fast and fun, like the equivilent of the Caterham 7 or the Arial Atom (if one was to compare PC parts to cars), just pure honest engineering. I dont always want 36" gold-plated spinners on my graphics cards' cooler!
I'm in complete agreeance with the soundcard issue too. I'm sticking with my Audiology ZS gathering dust in the bottom of my case and pumping out just as good sound (at least to my ears) as my fancy all-singing all-dancing new motherboard's built in sound device.
As far as 'enthusiast motherboards' go these days they're covered with copper heatsinks crafted into shapes that would make Henry Moore proud. However those "hardcore" people who are going to go pouring liquid nitrogen over their compontents, to whom it may be suggested that the additional features built into the board are aimed at, are going to yank these copper monstrosities off of the PCB and refit it with kit that looks like its from Halfords... doesnt this defeat the point somewhat.
Although after having some particularly noisy motherboard chipset fans in the past, personally like the all copper kit that comes on boards these days for the noise reduction factor alone. Having said that it no doubt adds to the cost (not to mention the weight of the PC in the end, if anyone ever tries to steal my PC I hope they have health insurance for when they do their back in trying to lift it!) as well as limiting the modifying potential. For instance if I wanted to watercool my Northbridge, I'd also have to think about some way to refit some cooling to 2 other chipsets and my VRM chips because at the moment its all done by one huge heatpipe... somewhat of a disadvantage in my book.
I guess the only way to make some people happy would be so that you could bespoke design your own components straight from the manufacturer. (Even if that were a possibility you can bet that they'd slap you with a price premium so high you'd need to remortgage to afford it)
So until the day that the entusiast starts running companys like ASUS and MSI instead of the PR people doing so, true enthusiasts shall have to make do with the likes of pneumatic hard drive mounts, mood-matching cases and the plethora of other marketing gimmicks soldered to our kit.
When it comes to cases the situation is worse thar before. I see emphasis on the exterior looks and when the sidepanel is taken off the interior is badly designed for airflow and the thing that angers me the most is the transversal mounting of the hard drives. Some cases are designed with 0 airfow to the hard drives (and when you have high performance ones the heat could reach dangerous levels). For me, only few models make the grade in terms of airflow, interior architecture and modding posibilities. I can say that I am a fan of single chamber cases and the models that make the grade for me are: Akasa Eclipse/Mirage 62 (and the newly nveiled Omega), Akasa Zen cases, Lian Li PC7 series, PC-A16 series and Antec NSK6000 and Titan 650 case. The only dual chamber case that makes the grade for me Silverstone TJ-07. I really want to see better designed cases with more modding potential that are fit for an enthusiast's systems.
I've been meaning to post on this article for a while -blocked forum access at work :( - and your update gave me a prompt to finally reply.
I don't have a problem about the commercialisation of the modding and overclocking. There is a lot more choice out there than was the case way back when and the cost is far far lower. However I do share a certain despair with the lack of variety in the market. Enthusiasts are consistent only in their desire to go further than the average, not in the direction they go in. Thus there are some who may be completely uninterested in overclocking or never play a game, but still want to get their setups optimised for their own needs. The shame is that the much of the new product is narrowly targeting a single area and not seeing that there are a lot of separate niches that should be aimed at other than SFF cube systems and money-no-object monster rigs.
The motherboard manufacturers, in particular, don't make enough effort to target products at particular applications. Why on earth is a super-high-end board loaded with wifi and onboard sound and god knows what else, given that at that level you will surely have add in cards and proper networking. Now what you really want is a board stripped of all the frippery designed for the purpose. Then again how many are providing a hardcore overclocking board in mATX? Or what board has made a real push to be legacy free since the IS7? Again there's Windows Home Server which (allowing for the correction of a limited but very annoying data-corruption bug) had a lot of enthusiasts trying to build boxes with a lot of non-ideal hardware. Why hasn't any of the majors produced a simple board with not much other than a 8-12 SATA ports onboard and a solid set of 2003 drivers? And there plenty more niches where a little bit of imagination and a touch of R&D could produce a product that would really capture the imagination and fire up some excitement.
For myself my hardware obsessions are monitoring, watercooling and complexity. I get most stuck in about finding ways of applying more and more obscure hardware to a rig. At times I think the total cost of the pushfits and pipefittings in my rigs would have cost more than the CPU!
Lets hope we see more well-targeted hardware and less of the herd products.
Thank you so much for this article! I work at a pc shop and i often see misguided "enthusiasts" come in after their striker extreme, sli-ed gtx, water cooled quad extreme systems take a dump. It sometimes hurts to try to find the logic in their madness especially when they spend all that money and not overclock. For example i had a customer who demanded a single stick of corsair ddr2-1142 for their basic dell w/ onboard video for gaming when they should get a graphics card and basic matched pair of ddr2-667 in dual channel.
Comments 26 to 50 of 51
I have to say, thank Tim too as he put in considerable effort to keep me pointing in the right direction, turning a rant into a read :o
I remember 250 1:1 on a 2500+ on a Shuttle AN35N Ultra that I vmodded. I remember buying a few 1700+ looking for a JIUHB. I then remember buying 2500+s looking for AIXDA steppings. I remember when the top of the line video card cost 250 and were thought our asses were sore then...
Fast forward, I DO own a 4 card system, without drivers for it to boot, and I'm RMAing a flaky board-a problem I've had more and more recently. Performance boards seem to go fast, if they go at all. My K9A2 Plat ran like a banshee, the three times it loaded Windows. It's now an expensive paperweight. Good thing it's 4 days old...
As far as innovation, check out my project log currently. I'm designing everything myself that can be done myself-blocks, loops, case, all reservoirs/flow balancing, etc. If I can't make it, I'm shelling out the dosh to get the tools or have it done, in one case. Some of us are trying to be innovative, but it gets harder and harder...
Great article. You've made my day brighter knowing I'm in a community of like minds.
still too expensive when 2 ultras are just as good
This whole situation reminds me of a quote from my dad:
I'll be the first to admit it though, I'm a sucker for obscure hardware. Despite the fact that a single 8800 would give better performance at a lower price, i'm still salicating over wanting a pair of 7950 GX2s. Never mind the fact that they're not that practical, and will unboubtably come with some headaches to get running, I still want them. I have a PCI slot reserved for a Phys-X card some day too.
Where am I going with all this? I'm not evn sure now. Oh yeah, just that the large e-peen is a valid market segment and a lucrative one. So too are the "performance at any cost" and the "out of control overclockers". There is also a market segment for the plain vanilla boards with lots of potential, and I think that segment is being underserved in the current market.
I dont know, but it was definately the picture that got me to click through, lol, who is it anyway?
The same thing is happening everywhere though.
I know in the last ten years it's happened with dirtbikes (another hobby of mine). When I was growing up, everyone had one, and when they broke we would fix them, ride them again, fix them, ride them......and we never had any downtime. I remember one time my uncle changed out the engine of his bike in the back of his truck, patched it up with some plumbing putty he had in his truck, and road the rest of the weekend.
Just last weekend I went up riding with a few of my buddies and the scene has completely changed. 10 year olds ride around without knowing even how to start their bikes, everybody have matching gear so when they ride by all I see is green (if they own a Kawasaki) Instead of work trucks and tents everyone has 75-ft triple opening, stretch trailers. And if the bike breaks it doesn't matter because , "Daddy" paid for the extended service plan and he'll be back in an hour with a brand new bike.
To me everything seems to be like this. Hobbies and crafts are less popular because you can buy most anything cheaper than you can make it. Not to mention that everything is a fad. I don't know anymore, I feel like a lone ranger when I ditch my friends to work on my computer case or rework the audio in my car. I guess it all comes down to the has and the has-nots. My parents never really bought me anything that I didn't need so when I want something I try to spend the least amount of money getting it. And if that means spending 2 nights working on an aluminum radiator grill just so I don't have to pay AC Ryan $26+ Shipping for something practically everyone has then so be it. At least mine's one-of-a-kind.
One of my pet peeves is CPU reviews where they use a top end MB to overclock a low end / mid-range CPU and claim what a great overclocker it is. If it requires a $300+ board you'd be better off buying a cheaper board and spending the extra on a higher clocked CPU. Being an enthusiast is about finding that balance - not about buying the top end of everything (or maybe not even the top end of anything).
But let's face it, many on here are the lemmings who pay the silly money for 'enthusiast' components purely for bragging rights.
Personally, I'm always chasing bang for buck... I've owned an FX5900XT, and GeForce 6600, a Pentium 805, a 7900GTO, an E6600, a P5B Deluxe and a Q6600. Many of us have tried a 2B pencil mod, or use nTune/ATI Tool/Rivatuner and other tools & techniques to make a more modest component perform like it's more expensive 'enthusiast' brethren.
I reckon the major OEM will be reading sites like BT and the other geek fora, but they aren't going to change their habits because too many people are buying the over-specced expensive toys that we are objecting to here.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you agree with Bindi, let your buying habits be the message to the OEMs, and in time they will listen.
Reminds me I've still got to mount that plaque! ;-)
Haven't got an oscilloscope or glasses, will a cat in my lap and my pinky in the mouth do? Muahahahaa!
Great article, enjoyed the read :)
But I agree about the enthusiast being the one who buys the cheapest he/she can and turns it into a machine with the power of one that cost twice or thrice the price.
My current system I knew exactly what I was after, so intead of buying that I bought the lowest I could that would overclock to the same specs, obviously not quite as old school as some manual modding, but what have I really got to work with now.
<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3
i shouldnt have to spent a month of research to decide what motherboard i want.. choices are good, but too many choices leaves people that dont spend 8hrs a day following the hardware scene a little out in the dust.
and, about the branding of stuff... i HATE that ... that whole fatal1ty series is JUNK... its like they take a perfectly crappy device, put more crap on it, paint it red, add some obnoxious LEDs, put that idiot's tag on it, and sell it for 25% more than the original product is... its not a good product to begin with, so the end product ends up being worse...
i dont see the point in spending twice the amount of money for things on my bios that i will never use... enthusiast boards are typically used for maybe a month at a time... these boards dont need cat5 cable testers built into them, they need the essentials for what they are designed for.
The current state of the market does make you wish there was something simple yet fast and fun, like the equivilent of the Caterham 7 or the Arial Atom (if one was to compare PC parts to cars), just pure honest engineering. I dont always want 36" gold-plated spinners on my graphics cards' cooler!
I'm in complete agreeance with the soundcard issue too. I'm sticking with my Audiology ZS gathering dust in the bottom of my case and pumping out just as good sound (at least to my ears) as my fancy all-singing all-dancing new motherboard's built in sound device.
As far as 'enthusiast motherboards' go these days they're covered with copper heatsinks crafted into shapes that would make Henry Moore proud. However those "hardcore" people who are going to go pouring liquid nitrogen over their compontents, to whom it may be suggested that the additional features built into the board are aimed at, are going to yank these copper monstrosities off of the PCB and refit it with kit that looks like its from Halfords... doesnt this defeat the point somewhat.
Although after having some particularly noisy motherboard chipset fans in the past, personally like the all copper kit that comes on boards these days for the noise reduction factor alone. Having said that it no doubt adds to the cost (not to mention the weight of the PC in the end, if anyone ever tries to steal my PC I hope they have health insurance for when they do their back in trying to lift it!) as well as limiting the modifying potential. For instance if I wanted to watercool my Northbridge, I'd also have to think about some way to refit some cooling to 2 other chipsets and my VRM chips because at the moment its all done by one huge heatpipe... somewhat of a disadvantage in my book.
I guess the only way to make some people happy would be so that you could bespoke design your own components straight from the manufacturer. (Even if that were a possibility you can bet that they'd slap you with a price premium so high you'd need to remortgage to afford it)
So until the day that the entusiast starts running companys like ASUS and MSI instead of the PR people doing so, true enthusiasts shall have to make do with the likes of pneumatic hard drive mounts, mood-matching cases and the plethora of other marketing gimmicks soldered to our kit.
I don't have a problem about the commercialisation of the modding and overclocking. There is a lot more choice out there than was the case way back when and the cost is far far lower. However I do share a certain despair with the lack of variety in the market. Enthusiasts are consistent only in their desire to go further than the average, not in the direction they go in. Thus there are some who may be completely uninterested in overclocking or never play a game, but still want to get their setups optimised for their own needs. The shame is that the much of the new product is narrowly targeting a single area and not seeing that there are a lot of separate niches that should be aimed at other than SFF cube systems and money-no-object monster rigs.
The motherboard manufacturers, in particular, don't make enough effort to target products at particular applications. Why on earth is a super-high-end board loaded with wifi and onboard sound and god knows what else, given that at that level you will surely have add in cards and proper networking. Now what you really want is a board stripped of all the frippery designed for the purpose. Then again how many are providing a hardcore overclocking board in mATX? Or what board has made a real push to be legacy free since the IS7? Again there's Windows Home Server which (allowing for the correction of a limited but very annoying data-corruption bug) had a lot of enthusiasts trying to build boxes with a lot of non-ideal hardware. Why hasn't any of the majors produced a simple board with not much other than a 8-12 SATA ports onboard and a solid set of 2003 drivers? And there plenty more niches where a little bit of imagination and a touch of R&D could produce a product that would really capture the imagination and fire up some excitement.
For myself my hardware obsessions are monitoring, watercooling and complexity. I get most stuck in about finding ways of applying more and more obscure hardware to a rig. At times I think the total cost of the pushfits and pipefittings in my rigs would have cost more than the CPU!
Lets hope we see more well-targeted hardware and less of the herd products.