Reply 40 of 46, by shamino
- Rank
- l33t
The article wasn't as bad as I feared, but it's not as good as it should be. I think it's just a test to see if the audience is interested. The info is lacking and not very well presented, so I don't think much time was spent on it.
I get the impression that the author's knowledge of late 90s hardware is a bit spotty. I'm not sure why he immediately jumped into a comparison of the 810/815 vs RAMBUS, ignoring the larger galaxy of chipsets and assigning importance to something that hardly matters when RAMBUS is no longer prohibitively expensive. If any chipset needed special mention, it's the 440BX, surely the most famous chipset of the late 90s and the closest thing to an industry standard for that period. Everything on it works well, and that's a big deal.
He made a short comment that AMD motherboards didn't have any notable issues in the late 90s.. really? If nothing else, they are famous for the AGP headaches suffered at the hands of their 2nd rate chipsets. He had already said AGP was desirable yet didn't seem to know how broken AGP support was on non-Intel chipsets back then. This was a far more deserving topic than SDRAM vs RAMBUS.
No mention of bad capacitors.. this should absolutely be mentioned, because it's a huge gotcha for anybody buying these old boards. People need to be aware of that problem and know what to look for.
The paragraph about Dell was a bit odd. He called out just 1 brand of prebuilt PC and reflected such a typical bias of the THG crowd that it came off a bit fanboyish. I'm guessing he isn't aware that the Dell motherboards of the Slot-1 era are actually Intel motherboards, very reliable ones which are more likely to still work today than most ABit/Asus/Gigabyte/etc boards. Honestly I've never heard complaints about the 6pin aux power connector before, and out of all the Dells I've run into, none have had anything plugged into it. I don't think that connector is unique to Dell. I've seen them on IBMs and on mainstream retail PSUs. The connector people usually complain about is the 20pin, which on many Dells of that time do have a different pinout.
I remember there was a THG article sometime maybe 1yr back about old motherboards, and the person writing that article didn't know what the 6pin connectors were. I'm not sure this author understands their purpose either. Most systems don't need them unless you've plugged in a lot of cards.
It wasn't too bad, but it's a bit weird to realize that the writers at THG today no longer have much memory or knowledge of P1/P2/P3 PC hardware. The site made it's name on that stuff.
Doesn't Thomas Pabst write articles anymore?