Rated: 100% (6 votes)
Loading ...The great chipset rip off.
l3v1ck
Is it just me or is SLi/Crossfire just a way to increase motherboard prices?
example: Back in the day, I had a choice between two motherboards by the same manufacturer, one had an nForce 4 SLi chipset, the other had the nForce 4 Ultra chipset. The only difference between the boards (apart from overvolting options for the northbridge) was the extra PCIe lanes and x16 slot for SLi. Unlike today’s chipsets, they were both capable of running the system at the latest HTT (FSB) speeds. I went for the Ultra chipset and was still able to overclock my Athlon 64 to the same values that were common in CPC at the time.
Nowadays you get boards with two, three or sometimes even four x16 PCIe slots. Sure you can run SLi/Crossfire, but who does? Not many people by the results of recent polls on the issue, and those that do often don’t get the performance boost they’re looking for (see CPC issue 58).
So why do people pay out for these high-end motherboards when they won’t use the headline features? Simple, over the last few years chipset manufactures have decided to force overclockers to use high-end boards, the price of which has gone up well above inflation. A few years ago a high-end motherboard was just over £100. Now they’re well over £200. They’ve done this by unnecessarily reducing the features on non-premium chipsets. If you want the best overclocking options and the most recently supported FSB, you have to buy a motherboard with a premium chipset. The manufacturers know that if they took a much cheaper mid range chipset and gave you a good overclocking BIOS, 95% of computer enthusiasts wouldn’t shell out for the high end boards anymore.
There are a few motherboard manufacturers out there that have done their best to help customers. Some have taken the P31 chipset from Intel and got it to run at P35 FSB levels, but if you use a CPU with a fast FSB, there isn’t much headroom left for overclocking. If these budget and premium chipsets are made using the same manufacturing process, there’s no reason not to run them all at the latest FSB speeds other than them just no wanting to. Sure, they could save a few pounds in production costs per chip in silicon if it only had (say for example) 20 PCIe channels, but then they’d lose a lot more in the drop in price they could charge for it.
No I know people will say “But look at all the cooling you get with premium boards, there’s heat pipes and fans galore”. True, but a lot of them are over engineered. All we need are good basic heatsinks on the Northbridge and VRM’s (for stable overclocks) and we’d be laughing. I guess we just have to hope that some motherboard manufactures will see the gap in the market for budget chipsets with good cooling and BIOS’s for overclocking, then fill that gap with a product that lots of people will want to buy.
Yeah, I pretty much agree, this is a subject that really gets on my t!ts. The cost of premuim boards has become ludicrous. Money no object, I wouldn’t buy a £250 board on principle - I don’t care how much copper they use, its not THAT expensive. No doubt someone will whine about the mobo firms having to recoup their R & D costs - that just doesn’t float - are we to believe that, copper heatsinks aside, the development cost of a premium board is triple that of a standard board? Your point on hobbling lower value boards is another pet hate - I love my IP35-E, its a great little board. It doesn’t have RAID, but I dont want or need it, it only has a single 16xPCI-E slot, but I would touch crossfire or SLI with a barge pole - these are choices you make when you research and buy a new component, but what possible reason would Abit have for limiting the Vcore adjustments to 0.2v increments? The last premium board I bought was a A8N-SLI deluxe - it cost about £115 and was on the elite list for ages. How many of these uber expensive boards are receiving that kind of accolade, regardless of their features or max FSB?
My Athlon board can do Crossfire for £60 but as tested in issue 58, my choice of graphics card (HD 3850) makes it pointless and even going up by one step to a pair of 3870s would still slow down my RTS games slightly, even if everything else would speed up.
At least Ye Olde SLI of the 3Dfx era was affordable to try out, it was never double the speed but at £50-80 per Voodoo2 card, you hadn’t technically overspent compared with modern prices. Like Spreadie said, it’s the principle, rather than doubling the cost of graphics performance in one generation, you might as well keep flogging an older card to upgrade to the next single board where there’s a decent performance increase.
I agree. The only performance motherboard I would buy is the Maximus Formula, because it is only £140, and only if I was going to watercool.
I still think that CPC’s testing was badly performed, mainly because it was using drivers that were older than the board it was performed on, but still, chipsets are the largest rip-off in a pc, second only to the CPU.
In other news, the P31 chipset price is set to rise, due to Intel’s fabs in china being damaged by the earthquake.
Is it just the P31 prices that will be going up, or will this effect all of Intel’s chipsets?