J.C. Roberts wrote:
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
I can "confirm" this and must say that lately, the quality of intel
boards is bad. Very bad.
Of 30 workstations 4 motherboards turned up broken, the SATA controller
on a server motherboard went foobar (and lost all data in the process)
and the IDE controller on another intel server motherboard broke twice (!!).
You're better off with some regular motherboard from MSI or gigabyte,
when it's broken you just replace it by something else.
If you really want decent stuff go with supermicro like mr. jc roberts
suggests. They have motherboards for amd processors too.
Glenn
