Actually, I probably have the most experience with PC-Chips boards. They're in my two home systems and about half of the systems I sell (the other half being generally Gigabyte or Microstar).
PC-Chips boards don't pretend to be anything they're not. Most are heavily integrated solutions designed to save you money. That's OK. Not everyone needs or wants to pay for the latest and greatest in 3D graphics.
My list of PC-Chips pros and cons:
Pro:
- they are the cheapest thing around; no where else will you find a board with so much stuff crammed on it for free, giving you the impression that if there was a way to throw in a lawn mower, PC-Chips would do it
- the integrated sound is usually a C-Media 8738 chip with good sound quality and A3D emulation, as well as 4-channel output; not bad considering you get it for free and most other boards use software AC97 codecs
- the on board 10/100 PCI network controller is just like any other network controller
- the integrated modem is usually a PC-Tel HSP micromodem with a small, proprietary riser card; to my astonishment, the recent drivers make this thing a little gem, handling my poor phone lines better than anything else except a Lucent LT; CPU usage is of course insignificant on any modern CPU, as we've seen before
- the on board video is as good or bad as the board's chipset; recent chipsets like the Aladdin TNT2 and the SiS 630 have made Quake3 at 640x480 a playable prospect for the budget minded; and even though there's typically no AGP slot, every PC-Chips board I've seen will automatically disable its on board video when a better PCI card is plugged in
- likewise, all the integrated devices can be manually disabled if you later want to upgrade them
Con:
- BIOS update support is poor but not terrible; they do release infrequent updates for currently selling boards, but they don't say what the updates do; also, they are unresponsive to problems that they consider unimportant, for example:
The M598 and M598LMR motherboards both have a bug in the jumperless CPU setup that underclocks any 100 MHz FSB to 95 MHz while still displaying 100 MHz. This means that your K6-2/500 is only running at 475 Mhz. Unacceptable. They did release a new BIOS or PCB that eventually fixed the problem with the M598, but not yet for the M598LMR, and it's been six months already. Obviously, they don't consider it a priority because no one can tell unless they use some tool that reports the true clock speed.
- board layout sometimes seems to suffer from dyslexia, leaving connectors in demented places like a floppy plug at the bottom of the board next to the PCI slot; lately they've been better about stuff like this
- I haven't seen a single review of PC-Chips or other low end boards from Anand or Tom or even a smaller site, making it difficult to judge a new release; they obviously don't think the boards are worth their time, but having used them extensively, and given how many millions are sold, it makes sense to at least give them a fair chance
- RMA rate is slightly higher and stability slightly lower than the top tier manufacturers; slightly is the key word here -- probably not enough to bother you if you have a good warranty
In the end, PC-Chips integrated motherboards are a great value provided you know what you're getting. If the system has no aspirations to heavy 3D gaming and you're on a budget, they're a good fit.
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