Motherboard Design

[Mist]

Does anyone think that there could be a better design for Motherboards?

The reason I say this is because for example, if you have a board with 5 PCI slots, then as soon as you stick a graphics card in the AGP which has a heatsink or fan, or both, then PCI slot no 5 becomes unusable, so effectively the board which is advertised as having 5 PCI slots efectively only has 4 functional slots.

It gets even worse if you have one of these mini boards with either 2 or 3 PCI slots.

I think it's a bad design, but I'm interested in what others think.

Michael.

 

[blahblah99]

The backplane design of the computer to hold the cards onto the computer chassis has pretty much become a standard already. The motherboard designers aren't the ones to blame. If you want more spacing between the AGP slot and PCI slot, designers will have to redesign the backplane of the chassis.

Solution: Just don't get such a fast video card.

 

[RyanM]

Well, some makers have started eliminating the slot next to the AGP card, and yet still have 5 PCI slots.

Personally, I could do with a mere 4 or 3 these days - Since the board has onboard ethernet, firewire, SATA, and plenty of USB ports, the only PCI card I have anymore is my sound card. In the future, I MAY end up picking up another add on card, but even then, that's only 2 slots total I'd need in addition to video. I'm not complaining.

 

[Peter]

Some boards have the AMR slot next to the AGP, and since AMR cards are very short, there's little obstruction.

Besides, there's a height standard on AGP cards that would easily make the next card fit - if the top notch consumer graphics cards wouldn't blatantly ignore the bounds.