Motherboards

Intel: Setting The Standard

Back in the day, we had Intel, and it was good. We only had a couple of motherboard chipsets to go with the CPUs that they produced, and there was very little research or effort that needed to go into the buying decision. However, over the years, as CPUs and systems from other manufacturers started coming to market, consumers could no longer rely on Intel as their sole source of solutions.

Intel, of course, would not want to promote motherboard chipsets that supported CPUs other then their own, and nobody can blame them for that. After all, who would want to expend their own corporate resources to help out their fledgling competitors?

That said, Intel eventually started to feel the heat from competition and started to push the envelope forward with a wider variety of offering. Perhaps the most legendary Intel chipset in the modern era has been the 440BX. This chipset was the foundation for the advanced Pentium juggernaut, and to this day is still one of the most stable, most efficient offerings ever produced. Motherboards based on this chipset are some of the best selling ever produced, and there are many still in operation. I know that the Asus P2B family was great, but my favorite board based on the 440BX has been the Abit BE6-II. It still compares well to many new motherboards in terms of bang for the buck, even offering support for 8 IDE devices.

Enter Rambus

The follow-up to the 440BX, the 815, never really reached its full potential. While heralded by some as a solid step forward, it never played out that way in sales. The next step up of major importance was the move by Intel to the Rambus memory architecture. While on paper it may have looked good, Rambus was monumentally expensive, and their pathetic corporate attitude was a loser from the start. Rambus had this great deal with Intel, and wanted to corner the market on this new technology. Instead of trying to compete on a level playing field, they bought up patents for SDRAM and DDR and told their lawyers to start sending out letters to other memory makers demanding excessive royalties in an effort to drive them out of business. The backlash was serious and immediate.

Consumers balked, memory makers balked and after Rambus lost a couple of court cases, even Intel started taking a step back from the relationship. Eventually, Rambus got hammered in every court case they prosecuted, and with Intel committing to a DDR alternative, Rambus had no choice but to go low-profile for a while and hope that the storm would pass by. The 820 chipset was plagued with problems, and it wasn't until the 850 that the Rambus picture has improved. To some extent, the storm did pass by, and now that Rambus prices have dropped and the 533mhz FSB has been introduced, it is clear that Rambus is at least as fast, if not faster, than any DDR solution currently available. Still, Intel is pushing a variety of 845 chipset solutions that look very impressive, particularly from a price/performance ratio. I hope that Intel decides to blow off Rambus completely, not only because of the fact that Rambus tried to dominate the marketplace with lawyers instead of competitive products, but because there are just too many chipsets with too many bugs coming out of Intel. The new DDR platforms look very promising, and given the hassles with the 820 and other chipsets, it would be better for everybody if Rambus was gone and DDR ruled the day.