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Aah, gotcha. Intel always makes you update the board with every new CPU gen anyway it seems lol.
Need new ATX DDR4 Motherboard
- Thread starter Pablo
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OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
I've had several MSI boards die, and several of their video cards, but I've been in the game a long time, like through the rise and fall of ABIT, when they were one of the best boards you could buy and the most innovative (the BP6 was truly cutting edge), lol, and the most bargain basement garbage you could buy was PC-Chips *shudder*. ALI, SiS... oh the memories of so much trash, hahaha.
Yes, Gigabyte has always been hit-or-miss as well, and that "dual BIOS" schtick, I think you hit that nail on the head.
If you guys every walked into an old school PCB shop in China, you would no longer wonder why stuff fails.
If you don't game you are sort of wasting money building a custom machine. For $250 on amazon you could have a brand new complete system that would blow away your old PC. Windows 11 Pro, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, 8 core 16 thread CPU, low power consumption and heat, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3 monitor support, etc. All that for less than what you just paid for a 2 year old i5 and motherboard alone.
MAYBE. Seems like when I try to look at some drawing or CAD file or stream video or listen to good music or clean up a large graphics file, even a jpg, on non gaming system (like this derm laptop) it bogs and waits.....and I wait then it goes. Screw that.
It doesn't have to be a shop in China, either.
To set this up, I put in 10 years for the biggest IC chip manufacturer in the Dallas, Texas, area. I had a desk job in engineering, but I was also inside the manufacturing area with the everyday workers. Now the biggest joke (that never gets told) about the IC manufacturing area is that the women are butt ugly. That is because they can't wear makeup, perfumes or antiperspirants. There are many everyday items that can kill the internal parts of an IC chip and a lot of these items are hanging around on the human body. Some big no-no items include: Aspirin, perfumes, antiperspirants, sodium, makeup, food particles and a slew of other items that you don't think twice about, but these contaminates can contaminate millions of dollars worth of product very easily.
Also, the air inside these manufacturing plants (at least in good U.S. factories) are temperature, particle and humidity controlled. They are MUCH cleaner than a hospital surgical room because the hospital only worries about germs.
This company that I worked for had their reputation marred because one of their IC chips failed during the countdown of a space shuttle and the liftoff had to be aborted and rescheduled. The failed IC chip failed because it was contaminated by the sodium from a small spec of human spittle.
So you are right. The Chinese chip factories can produce bad chips. But some of the best domestic ones can also produce duds.
I have worked in wafer fab areas, years ago. We did some different stuff though. IR detectors on sapphire. And some multiplexers. But I digress.
I was referring to printed circuit board shops with dirt floors, CA 2000 AD. There were no air quality thoughts at all.
I was working in higher rel telecommunications when the first waves of offshoring to China started by management - to save 0.89$ I distinct remember how I discovered the worst shop after we had some intermittent failures (shorts) - long story short there was trapped plating salts in PTH's with voids............came and went.........ultimately just FAIL. A supposed good assembly supplier -subcontracted out, and that shop subbed out one more lower tier (totally unknown to us at the time) to this shop. I made them take me there - by myself. Certs were faked, etc.
Yeah there went the China savings! But my mandarin improved!
I was referring to printed circuit board shops with dirt floors, CA 2000 AD. There were no air quality thoughts at all.
I was working in higher rel telecommunications when the first waves of offshoring to China started by management - to save 0.89$ I distinct remember how I discovered the worst shop after we had some intermittent failures (shorts) - long story short there was trapped plating salts in PTH's with voids............came and went.........ultimately just FAIL. A supposed good assembly supplier -subcontracted out, and that shop subbed out one more lower tier (totally unknown to us at the time) to this shop. I made them take me there - by myself. Certs were faked, etc.
Yeah there went the China savings! But my mandarin improved!
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I remember ALI and SiS… oh man. If I recall SiS actually started making OK stuff at one point. But that was like over 20 years ago and my memory of it is foggy.
The i5-12600k is miles faster than a 2-year old miniPC with a Ryzen 7 5700u and laptop hardware.
For $250 though, that's a killer steal.
My first ASUS Z370 TUF mobo after going back to PC gaming had issues with the USB ports after a year and same with the Gigabyte Aorus Pro Z590 board I purchased after that. So far my current ASUS Z690 is working 100% so that's a plus. I was considering the MSI Tomahawk before this ASUS one, although both my current and previous GPU were both MSI.
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OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
I think you might be over-selling that system's capabilities a bit. Also, that Ryzen CPU is older than the i5 (Q1 2021 vs Q4 2021) and offers about 1/2 the performance even with proper cooling (which is unlikely in that form factor) and of course zero expansion capability.
What I've found with those little guys is that their thermal management isn't great, so performance goes right in the crapper once they get hot, which is surprisingly easy to do.
Geekbench is showing a score of ~1,600 single and ~6,800 for multi-core for that unit. His old i7-6700K is ~1,500 single and ~5,200 for multi-core.
The i5-12600K he just bought shows a score of ~2,600 single and 12,000 for multi-core for very little additional cost, given that he already had the rest of the components, and if he does decide he wants to play Call of Duty or something, he can put in a better video card. And if he needs more space, he can slap in another hard drive.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Both were producing "bargain" chipsets for Intel, Cyrix and AMD CPU's. Both also produced video chips, SiS's video (often used onboard) was "adequate" for non-gaming use, and their drivers weren't too bad, that may be what you were thinking of. Their North Bridge and South Bridge chips were not great.
I can't remember the vendor, but they used an SiS "RAID" chip on one of their boards, so you had I think it was an Intel southbridge, but if you wanted to use RAID, you had to use the SiS controller, which had way lower throughput and it was of course software RAID and the drivers were total sketch (the arrays would just randomly break and have to rebuild, lol). That was before HighPoint kind of became the defacto standard (remember Promise?) and Adaptec wasn't really in the consumer space, they were still really focusing on SCSI.
SiS, ALi and VIA were the reason AMD CPU's (and to a lesser extent Cyrix, since they were always viewed as budget) didn't have the same reputation for robustness and stability that Intel enjoyed, who always produced their own chipsets, though of course that didn't stop some vendors from producing lower priced boards using cheaper chipsets. AMD of course famously stopped producing their own chipsets after Slot A. I had an ASUS Slot A board with an AMD chipset kicking around here for a long time. AMD's own chipsets were excellent.
Of course we later saw both ATI (before AMD bought them) and NVidia produce chipsets as well, which helped AMD to some extent. Once the Northbridge was rolled into the CPU die, things got a lot better.
NVidia famously produced a chipset(s?) that had a crazy high rate of failure (integrated video, which made it popular) that affected all major brands, including Apple. And, that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's, IIRC.
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The first “real” motherboard-cpu combo I ever bought with my own money was a slot A Athlon 650 mhz combo. I then waited and waited for the 1ghz chips. That was a pretty big leap back then.
Youngster.
I added a second 10Mb HDD to my PC and I was living - before that upgrading from 640K RAM to a full 1 meg of RAM was the RAM max!
Next era I had an 486 with EISA motherboard. I think I had 4Meg of RAM then upgraded to 8meg. There wasn't even gig HDDs then yet.
They probably had 1GB drives at that time but the average person wasn't going to spend somewhere around 2-3 grand for them. They definitely had 1GB drives in mainframe style machines in the 80s even but I think it was the early 90s before they got down to where say a smallish-medium business could afford the drive and had an interface that you could put in a PC class system.
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Hah, maybe. My first computer was DOS only and I cut my teeth building 486s. I just didn’t buy my own bleeding edge machine until later.
The nForce! I remember those, you needed them for SLI when nVidia released it with the GeForce 6xxx series.
No doubt. But when could DOS even handle the larger HDD?
Same but I was not building many. One.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
We may be similar in age. My first one I ever built was a Pentium 200 on an ABIT board, IIRC. When the BP6 came out, and you could do dual Celeron CPU's, that was a holy crap moment. I built my buddy his first custom PC when we were in 2nd year at Uni (he had an NEC Pentium 266 MMX prior) that had dual overclocked Celeron 300A's on a BP6 and 32MB of RAM. Had a WD 40GB hard drive, IIRC, and an Adaptec SCSI card for the Plextor SCSI 4x CD-RW drive.
I had plenty of computers before that (going right back to an 8088 if we aren't including the Commodore 128 my mom dragged home from the school board) but they were all pre-built. The first one I bought with my own money was an IBM Imagination Station (which I still have!) with a 486 SX/25 CPU. I bumped it up to 24MB of RAM at one point, and had a WD Caviar 1.6GB hard drive in it, that needed a software overlay to work, since the BIOS wouldn't recognize a drive that large, lol (remember the CHS limit?). I ran FreeBSD on it most of the time and used it right into the late 90's, as it was quite usable as a secondary computer with BSD, X and Xfce as the DE.
I tried to fire up my old 8088 a few months ago, but turning it on let the smoke out of something on the board, which wasn't reassuring. I haven't gotten around to pulling the board and see what cooked yet.
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