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First post, by ncmark

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I was looking at motherboards and now I am depressed 🙁
I am realizing how much things have changed. The last system I built was an athlon XP and I was behind the time when I built that - all that stuff I got used so it was old back then. I used that as long as I could, and then gave up on building altogether.
I went with the Athlon because it didn't look "scary" - translation, because it looked familiar (perhaps because it was behind the times)
Anyway, does it just look different or has it really changed that much?

Reply 1 of 2, by DerBaum

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PCs are still PCs.
I would say its even more simple to build one today as it was 20 30 years ago.
Sockets, connectors, and cases look a little bit different but still do the same thing as always.
Have a look at Socket AM4 it was introduced in 2016 and recently got new processors. Thats amazing. Way better then the old days...

One thing has not changed: If your components dont fit together, it does not work.

FCKGW-RHQQ2

Reply 2 of 2, by Ryccardo

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Yeah, biggest change from then isn't functional but rather every consumer model being black + "accent color" of their choice + stupid designs + often, stupid LEDs 😀 🙁

There may or may not be a super-io chip, in which case you may get 0/1/2 serial ports, 0/1/2 PS/2s and rarely one parallel - floppy and infrared are gone even from the most expensive+hardcore industrial lines (which instead tend to have a ridiculous amount of serial ports, like 4/6/8, and maybe have integrated PCI and/or miniPCIexpress slots);

All new systems are of course of the EFI types (CSM = BIOS emulation is still very common, but hasn't been 100.0% ubiquitous since 2015 or so, and best avoided anyway - unlike in 2011 where some motherboards, cough c847n, can't boot at all in pure EFI mode), AMI Aptio is the strong leader, and firmware quality/number of features/deliberate screw-yous are still as variable across individual brands and models as ever 😉

Most settings save to flash memory, not SRAM (usually the same chip as the firmware itself, but again there are exceptions), so the reset jumper may not necessarily be enough in case of severe settings corruption (as in, not the kind you should be able to do just by playing around with all the visible options!)