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BUAHAAHAHA!! i875P board with ISA slots

HEY!

Sorry, trying to get the attention of those guys bellyaching there are no boards with ISA anymore, haven't been for years. Often seen in the legacy free threads. If you run into one, send him to that url.
 
I guess that's one way to keep the primary performance up and maintain compatibility. 🙂

Obviously not meant as an enthusiast board, so the lack of AGP isn't an issue. Most of the ServerWorks chipsets which have been the primary server chipsets don't even support AGP. This is just moving to the highest performance chipset available while maintaining the same feature set.

The "bellyaching" would be referring to consumer/enthusiast boards with no AGP, not high-priced server boards that are useless for anything else.

Horrible layout though. Got those IDE and floppy ports shoved in nice and tight there so the cables will be hard to manipulate, and have all sorts of issues if you try to use a full length card.
 
That's great, now where can I get a Corvette with a hand-cranked starter for the engine? 😀

edit: heck, how about an 8-track too 😀
 
I've heard there are some proprietary ISA cards out there for various stuff like controlling machine tools.
 
actually vaccuum tubes make for very crisp clear audio! and everyone knows the ISA bus is the place to be for amazing 3D graphics performance, how about the ISA Pirannah card, or ISAcream, btw anyone read MaxPC here? lol
 
Originally posted by: Actaeon
3 ISA Slots?

Many many people have no need for even 1...
Click to expand...

*SIGH*

When will people understand that Supermicro is not a consumer level manufacturer. They make boards for corporate and industrial use. There are still sh!tloads of ISA adapters. If you don't know what they are, you haven't been in the industry long enough or haven't reached a certain level.

Windogg
 
Evermore, no, it's not lack of AGP that's the bellyaching. It's lack of ISA.

Usually what happens is someone posts a topic about legacy free.

Then I join in to say "yes, but PS/2 ports should be the last to go!"

(I like PS/2 ports)

Then others join in to say they work for or have heard of some research institute or whatever that had proprietory ISA cards and that they had to spent $200,000 to switch over to a few PCI cards that don't work as well.

Then someone points out that ISA boards are still around.

Most often the topic has played out by then.

🙂
 
Isa slots are used to this day for special proprietary ISA funtions on machinery and Control Management of speacialized Torque functions and cycle time on Multiple Machines. (Multiple being a Machine with 2 or more sockets to be torqued at a precise given number.)

We have some Computers a Chrysler on the Grand Cherokee, Wrangler , Rubicon 4.0 Line (using ISA Slots along with machines and Multiples that run on ISA.
 
A lot of PC's are used for stuff like doing alignments on cars. We had one at college that was used for that, and I'm positive it was an ISA card used to connect the rest of the machine to the PC with all the software on it.
 
Sorry, I meant that to say referring to consumer boards WITH AGP, i.e., bellyaching about consumer boards that are usable for an enthusiast/gamer but don't have ISA, whereas nobody bellyaches about server boards.
 
I agree, most engineering projects prototype with ISA boards. Scientific projects use custom ISA hardware. Considering the market for this board, they are far more likely to need something a normal desktop user doesn't. Normal desktop users need normal desktop hardware nearly all of which is available for PCI.

*I* use it for my Pro comms link to look up values and memory addresses for my favorite console games (the GameShark non-Pro) 🙂

It's not like PCI is easier to engineer for!
 
Then others join in to say they work for or have heard of some research institute or whatever that had proprietory ISA cards and that they had to spent $200,000 to switch over to a few PCI cards that don't work as well.
Click to expand...
I guess you are talking about me. Here are some examples:
1) I'm a chemical engineering grad student. We just moved into a new building last July and had to move all the equipment along. The department decided to upgrade all the computer equipment in the labs (including the chemical engineering operations lab). Well each experiment is controlled by a computer - ISA is the king of cards to do this with. Each PCI card costs a bare minimum of $1000 (plus thousands more if that equipment needed extenders or adapters). Multiply that by 20 experiments and you get into the $100,000 range just because ISA was not available in any major OEM computer. So instead they switched to a whole new type of control that cost $188,000 for the one lab and they still have a full time employee working on software to get the stuff up and running with the new equipment.
2) A little known fact on how Windows works with cards is that ISA cards can be accessed at a much higher frequency. Suppose you wrote a program with a loop where you read/write from an ISA card. Even the slowest pentium computers can run that loop on an ISA card roughly 1 million times per second (note for reads the issue of a slow computer being able to store 1 million pieces of information per second is a problem though). Do the exact same thing with a PCI card - you'll get roughly 500 reads/writes on a slow Pentium and I can get up to 2000 reads/writes per second on a 1.7 GHz Xeon. At least for my work, that is a tremendous disadvantage that PCI has. It is a Windows problem, but drivers don't exist for Linux for the vast majority of industrial cards. Heck I'd be willing to write a program to run from DOS on a new computer (and I have in the past for specialized equipment) but I don't have a clue on how to access a PCI card from a DOS program (note: I'm not a trained programmer, so maybe there is a way).
3) About twice a month we get posts here from new people joining Anandtech specifically looking for ISA. So there are people out there desperately looking for it. The most recent one was some sort of mechanic wanting ISA on a notebook (which is certainly not going to happen).
4) Here are some links to ISA products from companies that are better performing or far cheaper but I cannot use and must settle for PCI: Keithley (which is where I got the 2000 vs 1 million numbers), National Instruments, and Ocean Optics (which has an ISA card that does its job in 5 milliseconds versus an external USB card that takes 13 milliseconds).
 
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