First post, by Tetrium
- Rank
- l33t++
This may interest some of you.
As we all know, all of the old i/o devices are being phased out (PCI, parallel and serial, PS/2, IDE and Floppy) and even though this makes perfect sense from most standpoints, there are a very few reasons why anyone would want these legacy ports to be present on a as new motherboard as possible.
My reason for looking for one is as a replacement/upgrade for my offline database computer.
Short background story: About 3 1/2 years ago I build my very first new fastest rig to succeed the P3-1000 that was at that time my main computer, I call it my offline database.
This computer is where I keep everything digital that I want to keep, manuals, drivers, ISO's of Windows media, LOTS and LOTS of random information I found on the net including a full copy of th99, countless forum threads with interesting tidbits of information related to virtually anything, patches, a couple full games + 3rd party downloads.
Of course for such a rig I wouldn't need the fastest computer on the planet, a single core would suffice except for using Virtual PC perhaps.
But there was one problem for me: I specifically wanted a motherboard with an onboard FDC because I'm using WinImage for creating images for the use of my retro rigs, and it has to support the 2.88MB floppy drive. As I've not found any USB floppy drive which can be modded with a 2.88 floppy drive (and because having one directly on board is much more convenient) I wanted a modern board with the onboard FDC.
My preference was AM3, as this way I could buy 2x4GB DDR3 memory, use these to replace the 2x2GB DDR3 sticks I have in my main rig (which is basically my gaming/internet rig) and then use the 2 2GB modules for the offline database rig.
Of course modern websites often have very convenient search options, but the problem for me was they nowdays omit a search option to filter by FDC, so I had to do some creative googling in order to find something.
After doing a lot of looking around I found 1 board that may be (or perhaps even is) the most modern motherboard that still has the onboard FDC:
The MSI 870A-G54
The funny (worrying?) thing is, the picture does include both IDE and FDC (I counted 17 pins in a row, x2 makes 34 😀) but the specs page on the MSI website (link here) doesn't mention the floppy connector. Perhaps it's only included in some of these boards?
Anyway, my guess is that Asrock may also have a couple modern motherboards in their assortment that include an onboard FDC, but I haven't checked that yet. I'm thinking Asrock as Asrock seems to produce the most retro-friendly boards atm.
Why I'm typing this? Dunno, maybe it's of some help to someone? 😉
Anyway, feel free to speak out your thoughts! 😉
