Al said:
Do u have any other tips on on the hardware components on what to look for?
The solid polymer caps is a really good one.
FWIW. One tech computer techy at a store that sells a lot of gigabyte MBs
and strongly suggested that I do NOT go with Gigabyte if I plan to go with
the i7 CPU. I imagine it would be ok if I would ok but I'm not familiar
with them.
I'd look for
1) Solid polymer caps (as a means of avoid cheap or imitation electrolytics).
In fact, motherboards don't really need to use solid polymer caps,
but it is the only easy way to avoid getting low quality caps on a
board. And with counterfeiting being what it is, you never know.
2) Number of phases in Vcore circuit. Motherboards might vary from 3 to 16
phases. The phases can have more or less power handling for each one,
so 16 phases is not 5x better than 3 phases. But what you don't want,
is a Vcore design that looks exactly the same, as a $50 motherboard
on Newegg. Some motherboard designs actually state their power handling
capabilities, so you get assurance the Vcore is not marginal. (The
140W AMD boards for example.)
3) I might have a slight preference for switching versus linear regulation
for other onboard resources. Switching uses coils, so you might see a coil
or two near the memory sockets. And perhaps another one, used to power some
part of the chipset. Switching regulators can be more efficient than linear
regulators. And switching regulators usually have better protection against
failures (kill the gate drive, if there is a problem). I've seen some linear
regulators, which have no protection against overheat, overcurrent and so on.
Most of the time, the linear works fine, but if there was a problem, something
could get hot enough to melt the solder holding the components down. I've
only read one report, of a "meltdown".
4) The layout may determine how much fun it is to run cables inside the chassis.
For example, if you had a floppy drive, and the floppy connector was placed in
the opposite corner, you'd have this cable in your face all the time.
Some ideas seem nice at the time, but don't grow on you. I've heard a few
people curse side-mounted SATA connectors for hard drives.
5) If you use big video cards, make sure when one or more video cards are
installed, the video card doesn't interfere with the memory ejector latches,
cover up any hard drive connectors, and so on. Do an interference check
on the thing you're buying, so later when you upgrade the video, you're
not disappointed.
With regard to Core i7
1) As far as I know, the boards are all using X58 chipset. So they all start
with the same materials. The memory controller is inside the processor.
Which in principle, means they should all handle memory equally well.
(The BIOS is the differentiator...)
2) Any company can screw up a design, by using the wrong controlled impedance
for some tracks in a board. But in addition to simulation before the fact,
motherboard designs may go through as many as three revisions, before the
third revision ships as product. So the companies should have had an
opportunity to get basic functions working. If you see reports of one company
screwing up all their boards of a single generation, then the
Newegg reviews should pick up on that. If you're buying a motherboard
after the early adopters have tested it, there should be plenty of
warnings to go around.
3) I see the occasional mention of one memory slot not working on
the triple channel Core i7. While I haven't seen any confirmation,
it could be a contact problem in the processor socket. It is possible
the processor is not seated properly when that happens. Having heard of
that kind of thing happening, I'd re-seat the processor
a second time, before declaring the motherboard I got was DOA.
HTH,
Paul
