Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Eh, VelociRaptors arn't cheap, And not for the size I want.
A fricken 74gb is like 280$ here. Its way cheaper to raid and get more storage lol.
I stay away from External Drives for general computer use, They are to slow for my liking, and again, are more expensive then need be, Unless you make it yourself, but im to lazy for that.

For everyones sake we should hope they get larger.
Like I said, Its impossible on standard ATX boards to have Tri Sli or Quad, and still use your PCI slots, for that companies have to up to ETX boards.

I would love to run Crossfire in my rig, But can't as I would have wasted 100 bucks on a TV tuner and 200 on dedicated sound card, Why, Because the now common Dual Slot GPUs block the PCI slots, why, Because motherboards are to small.

There is pleanty of room for more sata ports, if companies actually phase out the crap that is rarely used on the "Enthusist" boards, such as IDE, but more so, Floppys.
Remove that crap like most are doing with X58 boards, and add 2 or 4 more Sata ports.
Move Ram and CPU socket up, and put room for atleast one PCI socket to not be blocked.

It'd be rather easy, just they never think about design and placement, but rather pointless features such as floppy and IDE

Which would go in which slot not occupied by a Dual slot GPU or another PCI device?
I have 3 PCI slots, 1 is blocked because boards are to small/crap design, the other 2 are in use.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Actually, that's a good idea. I don't think we even have <100GB Velociraptors here, but 300GB is NZ$420. But it is still much cheaper to put two drives into RAID 0, you get much more storage: for $400 here you can get two 750GB HDDs. So more space. Lots more.

Okay, so ASUS it is.

I don't seem to recall any mobos with 3 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, it's always 1 x16, 1 x16/x8, and 1 x8...?

They are good for carrying stuff around, though. But in that vein, I don't see the point of a 1.5TB external HDD...


Oh, and one more random question (I'm thinking of these just as I go along with this...) what does the .11 bit mean when someone or somewhere says a 7200.11 hard drive?

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

You know alot of people need a floppy for drivers right?
Your statements are pretty much null. If you want all your PCI slots go for water its that simple. Boards do NOT need to be any bigger. Things will continue to get smaller. You are very much in the minority of needing more space. Perhaps you should have gotten a PCIx tuner and sound card instead. Or you could always get a PCIx sata controller. Not everything has to be PCI. And if you dont like the feature set you should buy another motherboard that suits your needs next time.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

We still have a few floppies of stuff for XP installations and stuff, but I thought that was already being phased out in favour of the CD years ago (case in point, my Radeon 9600)

Another question (sorry... =p), what are the other ports on the motherboard actually used for? And are there any other uses for the PCIe ports other than for graphics cards?

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

They don't make a 74GB VelociRaptor. Don't go confusing them with the old Raptors now, believe me they're in a different league (I have a 150GB Raptor around as well).
It's a 4 bay eSATA box ta very much, more than fast enough. ;) To be honest though the main reason I got it is so that I could downsize my machine. As awesome as the Lian Li V2000 is they're not exactly small cases...

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

You do know more people have the internet then floppy drives?
Never in the past 3 years have I seen anything come on floppys.
They where phased out like 9yrs ago now, I remember it being hard to buy floppys in 2000!

Go for water?! Water what?
Graphics cards will still be dual slot, overlapping other PCI slots, water cooling fixes nothing.
Bigger boards means your not wasting money on slots and things you can't use because the board is to small.
You either my PCIx in Express, or PCIx in the tiny mofo that I forget its speed but is 1-2cm in lenght slot.

PCIe slots, solves nothing, 1 is taken, the other then removes what I want...SLI/Crossfire.
PCIx *tiny mofo?* is again, overlapped and useless.

Further, BOTH varients of cards are extremely rare to find down in Aus, Even online Aus stores.

Keep in mind Kow, this motherboard is a top of the line X48 worth near 500 AUD (Retails for 450 AUD)
Buying this one at the time wasn't an option, it was just way to much, its only cause of a stuff up I got it, And for a top of the line mobo, from one of the best companies in mobos, I would expect a lot more.

Further, ETX is only 2 - 4CM bigger then ATX, which STILL fits in standard Mid ATX cases, So size in the cases is not an issue.
You say things get smaller, And yet look at the way of the phone, The more features, the bigger it gets.
Only with a phone, you can actually use all features, with a motherboard, your limited because the refuse to go a bigger size, which is what ALOT of enthusiast's require, larger motherboards.

The average motherboard has 2 usable PCIe slots, and 1 Usable PCI slot, The average mobo has 2 PCIe slots, 3 PCI slots, 1 - 2 PCIx slots.
An average PC using features with the motherboard, Has a 2* ESATA bracket, 2 ODDs, and 1 HDD.
Which is 5 Sata ports, yet most motherboards feature only 6 Sata ports, That leaves very very little room for upgrading.
If you have an external HDD, it's most likely going to use Esata now a days, so you dont have much choice if you want to use Esata but keep the bracket.

There is no reason to not push ETX motherboards, and I have stong feelings it is the way of the future, Companies will realize that they can't fit all the features they want, and a motherboard standard that is more then 12 years old.
It's like 64bit, thousands of people said "no" to it, "4GB ram is never going to be needed" yet low and behold, people are running 12GB ram, servers are running EXABYTES of ram, some servers are running 128bit OSs because 64bit doesn't support enough ram, yet it supports 16 Exabytes.

BluRay ODDs are much larger then CD ODDs and DVD ODDs are larger then CD ODDs, That hasn't changed since DVDs first came around, the drives are still larger.
Things are getting bigger in order to do what they are designed for.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

PCI-X slots are huge, larger than anything you'll have on your motherboard (there's no way in hell that a modern desktop board is going to have a PCI-X slot). I guess you mean a PCI-E 1x slot which are the small, relatively slow PCI-E connectors that are slowly replacing PCI?

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Actually the "average" motherboard has 1pci-e slot, 1 pcix slot, and 1 pci slot. You are in the minority. Btw, I've seen your motherboard you can have a pcix sound card, and pcix sata card then add a pci tuner. Also, I hope you know that you can use the PCIe slots as PCIx slots also since you're not even using crossfire.

And when I talked about water I meant watercooling. Which you dont have to play stupid about. There are full coverage blocks for cards that dont take up any extra slots and the tubing goes up so it doesn't interfere with other cards. Innovatek Cool-Matic 8800GT (G92)
Like I said before. All you have to do is plan things out better and buy a board that has all the features you need or buy expansion cards that will fit according to your motherboard.

Pedantic - you can use the PCIe slots for RAID cards or use them as a PCIx slot if you dont need to add an extra video card. They are 16x slots but also backwards compatible to 8x cards (RAID), 4x cards (more RAID), and PCIx (pretty much everything that also comes in PCI)

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

The high-end X58 boads have full 2.0 x16(x3) PCI-E slots


The only time I've seen that is with Seagate's drives. In that case, it only refers to the drive series.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

I thought the motherboard usually has a built-in RAID controller anyway? But that clears it up a bit.

So it doesn't mean anything special then? Because I've never seen anything other than .11