News on Supermicro X10SAT?
- Thread starter brutalizer
- Start date
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Patrick,
The X10SAE has PCI slots. PCI slots are legacy, and I wonder if they "bloat" the mobo? What do you think about that? I mean, if I buy a mobo with serial and parallel ports, wouldnt those ports need additional chips and hardware that bloats the mobo? Sure, the Thunderbolt connection requires new chip and hardware, but that is not legacy. I would like a clean and lean mobo, with no bloat. So, would PCI slots that are never used, bloat the mobo, suck power, etc? Anyone has thoughts on this?
The X10SAE has PCI slots. PCI slots are legacy, and I wonder if they "bloat" the mobo? What do you think about that? I mean, if I buy a mobo with serial and parallel ports, wouldnt those ports need additional chips and hardware that bloats the mobo? Sure, the Thunderbolt connection requires new chip and hardware, but that is not legacy. I would like a clean and lean mobo, with no bloat. So, would PCI slots that are never used, bloat the mobo, suck power, etc? Anyone has thoughts on this?
Generally having physical slots does not add much/ any power draw unless they are occupied. I have seen enough machinery controlled via custom PCI boards that the decision somewhat makes sense. I do think the X10SAT makes more sense to get, but since they have the same base motherboard design, and I have a SAE my sense is that they are in production.
Serial and parallel controllers take barely any transistors or power now, especially if unused. The only real "bloat" would be the traces and connectors on the board, something ATX has plenty room for with a UP design.
The Q series 'business' and C series 'workstation' PCH provide a native intel PCI controller that is well supported, there is no extra chip needed.
The consumer PCH like H and Z do not, that is where you see cheap 3rd party bridges (typ. asmedia) that may or may not work properly with lots of pci devices. Murphy's law means that 15 year old card that controls your $100k industrial machine will be the latter, so on those boards I would rather not see pci slots at all.
The 6/7/8 series chipsets are pin compatible, so I'm sure they all originate from a common parent (1 for desktop) and intel fuses off features as needed, a lot like they bin cpus with the same # of cores. (e.g. celeron/pentium/i3 start from a 2C/4MB 'blank', i5/i7/E3 xeon start from 4C/8MB)