On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 08:00:47PM -0400, Eben King wrote:
> >
> > I shy away from boards with onboard components, buying halfway decent
> > PCI/AGP cards. I have onboard sound on my current board (Asus A7V333), but
> > it didn't come _without_ sound, and I use a Soundblaster Live! anyhow.
> > And never, ever buy a winmodem. You may save on the purchase, but you'll
> > pay for it later.
> >
>
> That's a very good point (avoiding onboard components). Unfortunately,
> that policy is becoming increasingly difficult to implement: more and
> more stuff is getting integrated with more and more boards. Now, you
> pretty much can't buy a worthwhile motherboard for a reasonably recent
> processor without getting at least one each of onboard sound and network
> adapters. In fact, at the current rate, it seems like by the end of the
> year nobody will be making boards that need any common component
> (discounting things like SCSI controllers that most people never use for
> desktop systems) added to them aside from video. I'm tempted to call
> that mild hyperbole, but I'm not certain it won't be true.
>
> Finding a decent new motherboard that doesn't have onboard sound is an
> exceedingly frustrating endeavor these days.
True. When I get a new motherboard, I'll use my SB Live! if it works,
simply to avoid the limitations of built-in sound hardware. If it doesn't,
I may be driven to buy another sound card by the suckiness of the existing
hardware.
More stuff is being built in, that's true. Or rather, a minimal version of
some things are onboard. Take RAID for example. Yes, it's *sort of* there,
but the onboard "RAID" is sometimes software-implemented, and drivers only
exist for Windows. You can usually implement desired features through
add-on cards, and simply ignore onboard components.
For a home LAN it may not make economic sense to use a separate PCI ethernet
card, but for things like videeo, sound, SCSI, RAID, etc, it probably does.
That is, unless you're trying to build a very small (physically) system.
--
-eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
Your pretended fear lest error might step in is like the man who
would keep all wine out of the country lest men should be drunk.
-- Oliver Cromwell
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:29:23 EDT