On Thursday 28 December 2006 15:33, Anthony Hennessy wrote: > I was thinking of using an Intel S3000AHLX because of their high > build quality
Either your personal experience with Intel mother boards is a statistical anomaly, or you've mistakenly believed the hype told by Intel sales and marketing. Yes, Intel does employ some top-notch engineers and yes, extreme care is used when designing and building a small subset of their boards, but said subset are not mass market boards and are not available to the general public. The subset where extreme care is used is mainly their specialized designs used for internal chip/device development and testing within Intel itself. The stuff built for internal Intel use is absolutely beautiful and is as close to flawless as one can imagine. The publicly available mass market mother boards with the Intel brand stamped on them are usually not engineered, designed or built by Intel. Worse yet, they are roughly reference designs built with a primary emphasis on cost. Intel dictates the specs, features and price point, then the work is farmed out to the lowest bidder. Dell and other brand name "System Vendors" regularly take the Intel designs and tweak them further to differentiate features and/or further reduce costs (as well as the usual bug fixing). You should think of Intel branded mother boards the same way you think about Microsoft branded keyboards and mice... -A known brand name slapped on the work of another, unknown company, simply because the mistakenly trusted brand name will sell. If you're really after "build quality" in a mother board, you'd be better off with SuperMicro for Intel procs. If you'd consider AMD Opteron, Sun is well known for their over-engineering, but truth be told, all of the Sun Opteron stuff is actually engineered and built by Sanmina-SCI yet in this case, it is extremely high quality work. DISCLAIMER: Yes, I'm the same idiot who writes the PCB layout analysis software available at www.DesignTools.org, not all designs are done with the Cadence tool chain, and layout is only one chunk of many in the process of building a high quality board. Kind Regards, JCR
