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Why do boards have so many erroneous options?

M

mdahc

Senior member
Why is it that almost all top tier motherboard manufacturers tend to include so many erroneous options on boards based on nF3 and nF4 like PCI SATA or gigabit LAN instead of using the native chipset controllers? Or how about Gigabyte's recent addition of Firewire 800 to some of their boards (800Mb/s on the PCI bus...is that possible?). I'd personally rather see more Firewire 400 ports or Soundstorm instead. Did they all buy like a sh*tload of these controllers when they first came out, and now they're just trying to clear out inventory or something?

Also, does any of you know the peak bandwidth of PCIe (non graphics)? I'd love to have Firewire 800 (not that Firewire 400 isn't keeping me happy), but they only make PCI/PCI-X Firewire 800 cards as of now (I seriously doubt the PCI bus can maintain an 800Mb/s rate, and I'm not about to buy a server board with PCI-X). If the PCIe bus can actually support up to 800 Mb/s, then that gives me some hope I guess. I'm just thinking of the future when HDV camcorders and Blu Ray disc drives become standard (and relatively cheap). The extra bandwidth sure would come in handy in those cases.

Any thoughts?
 
Well, isnt 800mb/s 100MB/s? And the PCI bus is 133MB/s? Of course, it depends on what else you've got running on the PCI bus.
 
Yeah, but if you have PCI gigabit LAN and a sound card, then it tends to get a little crowded on the PCI bus. I don't know. I'd like to get that new Gigabyte K8NXP-9, and I guess I could just disable the PCI gigabit LAN and SATA controllers, use the nVIDIA controllers only, and just settle for integrated audio. That would give the Firewire 800 controller plenty of room. Now that I think about it, should one even disable these if nothing is connected to them (i.e. are they taking up significant bandwidth although they're not being used)?
 
It's hard to imagine your soundcard would be in danger of utilizing over 33MB/s. And do you really need the full GbLAN while ripping video?
 
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