Motherboards: Your View's On Improving Designs.

[BiG K]

As the title says, What would you change on the motherboard if you had a once in a lifetime chance to design one?

Personally for me, The current high end motherboards, have only 1 IDE port, which means you can only plug in two IDE devices at the same time. What do people do, when they have 3 IDE devices? (PCI IDE adaptor is useless, as there are no vacant PCI slots, and IDE-SATA adaptors are not too reliable!) IDE devices are still being manufactured, so why stop the support?


USB/Firewire brackets. The modern geek needs USB ports.......not just one or two, or even four. We need 8 or maybe ten is quite preferred. Great news is that most high end motherboards have support for ten USB ports and a couple of firewire. Only problem is, there are usually only 4 USB ports on the backplate and no firewire. The rest are given as brackets. So why would I want to change this?
Each bracket only has two USB ports on it, which means you get 2 USB brackets and one firewire bracket. (The remaining two USB ports are supposed to be for the front USB, in your case
Because for some reason, there are only 8 PCI slots. 4 are taken up by dual slot graphics card, one is taken up by a soundcard, another 1 is taken up by my Wifi card and the seventh one is taken up by my TV card.
I have one spare PCI slot I can use, only problem is, each bracket only has two USB ports, when you can clearly fit atleast 4!!
I thought it would be cheaper to produce one bracket than two........makes you wonder doesn't it?

Sound. Most motherboards, if not all, come with onboard sound. Sometimes, all the speaker jacks are located on the rear I/O plate.
Sometimes there are just headers, to use with a bracket (preffered solution)
However, motherboard manufacturers have now started to use proprietary sound card slots, taking up a valuble PCI/PCI EX space! it might be acceptable, however, what happens when you want to use a standalone sound card? You end up with a useless expansion slot.
How about making the proprietary sound card fit into a normal PCI-e x1 slot, and use a dipswitch that can change the function of the slot from sound card to normal PCI-E X1 Expansion slot, therefore you can add another PCI slot?

PCI Slots. There just aren't enough of these useful expansion slots. However there are loads of useless pce-e x1 expansion slots.........just because these may be the new fangled slots, doesn't mean we are going to give up on our legacy PCI devices. We might actually give up on our legacy PCI devices, except there just isnt any freaking support for pci-e x1 devices, how many have you seen out there on the market?

[DanDaMan]

I'd get rid of the damn legacy floppy drive connector and stick something more useful there instead.

[maverick]

I've built a fair few pc's in my time.. and BiG k, I agree with all your comments! On the IDE front I wish they'd stop making IDE drives and make them all SATA.. so much tidier!