Were you more interested in motherboards and chipsets when there were more players?

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,536
336
126
Back when VIA and NVIDIA were real players, and then from time-to-time there were some interesting offerings from SIS and ALI that had promise to elevate their market shares, I was a lot more interested in keeping up with the latest trends, technical specs, or competitive benchmarks in chipsets (and by extension, motherboards generally).

But in the last few years, its all been sooo....predictable. Same same. I just don't look forward to or get excited by big chipset and motherboard review or competitive benchmark articles like I used to.
 

Sukhoi

Elite Member
Dec 5, 1999
15,332
95
91
The problem is there are just as many damned models even with fewer manufacturers. I haven't dealt with any PC hardware since 2007, so I'm out of the loop. Lately I've been thinking about dropping cable and building a tiny quiet HTPC, so I took a glance through General Hardware earlier today. It just made my head spin...hard to even figure out where to start.
 

vi edit

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 28, 1999
62,483
8,344
126
I lost interest when the real value and bang for the buck in overlcocking went by the wayside. You can buy whole computers now for what a single CPU used to cost 10-15 years ago.
 

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,536
336
126
It was even harder prior to there being just two chipset vendors on the market. Any time you are out of the loop for a while, it is difficult to just drop in and get a handle on the choices.

But there was a time when I WANTED to keep up with all of it. I would read every page of a chipset review or technical analysis from three different websites, sometimes twice. I haven't felt that way in three years now. I just glance at the feature highlight charts, anymore.
 

DesiPower

Lifer
Nov 22, 2008
15,299
740
126
I lost interest when the real value and bang for the buck in overlcocking went by the wayside. You can buy whole computers now for what a single CPU used to cost 10-15 years ago.

... and you could actually save by building your own, now you loose money big time... sukx
 

AznAnarchy99

Lifer
Dec 6, 2004
14,695
117
106
... and you could actually save by building your own, now you loose money big time... sukx

Yea people used to come to me to ask me to build them a computer to save money. I just tell them to go buy a premade somewhere since you really cant beat them at a price like $300-400.
 

foghorn67

Lifer
Jan 3, 2006
11,883
63
91
The problem is that ALI and SLS sucked pretty bad. At least most of the manufacturers that decided to use their chipsets.
 

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
57,960
8,204
126
I don't follow hardware like I did, but it's no loss to me. I'm brand loyal to Intel chipsets, and generally Gigabyte and Asus for makers, so my choices haven't changed much.
 

frostedflakes

Diamond Member
Mar 1, 2005
7,925
1
81
For better or worse, that's just the way these things are heading. The trend is always higher integration, and with more and more on the CPU, chipsets are becoming less important.

It's kind of a mixed bag. For example Intel pushing chipset competitors out of the market really came back to bite them in the ass with this whole Sandy Bridge fiasco. If there were competing chipsets available, at least Intel would have been able to sell Sandy Bridge chips. But since they're the one with Sandy Bridge mobos, they were forced to pull and stop selling the CPUs as well, which cost them a lot of money.
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
17,768
485
126
I miss the days of unified socket architecture. For those not following along that means you could buy a motherboard and choose whether you ran an AMD or Intel processor. :D
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
17,768
485
126
Wasn't there a UMB chipset way back, like in the 486 days?

Sounds familiar but then again I may be having flashbacks to writing out lines in my config.sys...

DOS=HIGH, UMB

:biggrin:
 

vshah

Lifer
Sep 20, 2003
19,003
24
81
i feel the same way. now i just stick with whatever Asus board has the ports I need and call it a day.
 

PieIsAwesome

Diamond Member
Feb 11, 2007
4,054
1
0
I don't think I have ever cared about motherboards or chipsets. I just go with whatever deal or best price/quality ratio I can find. I used a free ECS board I got from Frys for a while. It got the job done. I do care about CPUs and videocards, though.
 

Veliko

Diamond Member
Feb 16, 2011
3,597
127
106
Maybe it's because you are older and the appeal of poring through half a dozen reviews about motherboards has faded.
 

Colt45

Lifer
Apr 18, 2001
19,720
1
0

I think UMC made chipsets, they made random peripheral chips at the very least (PIAs and timers and shit like that)

Unicorn Microelectronics. With a name like that you wonder how they could have possibly went bust...

hmm, just looked it up and it still exists? apparently "united" microelectronics these days.
 

JimmiG

Platinum Member
Feb 24, 2005
2,024
112
106
Yeah, it was fun researching which chipset was compatible with which GPU.. Or scanning forums to see if the chipset you decided on would cause random lockups, silent data corruption or inexplicable 30% performance drops with certain combinations of hardware.

Not to mention trying 15 different "4in1" drivers to find one that actually worked.