Things that should be present in every computer.

I braided my two sata cables together. they seem to be much more sturdy and less prone to wobbling.

What i'd like to see on a computer is an IV caffeine drip. Or maybe pop-out partner-cancelling ear plugs. Failing that I'd be quite happy with a new socket arrangement for the chassis panel.
 
We have got a nice little list going here, as for the motherboard layout, what do you guys think is best, I personally think every board should be layed out like my AA8XE.

fatal1tyaa8xetop5009gq.jpg


Before I go on, I would just like to point out I have taken the mosfet shroud off as it actually made temps go up, well done Abit :confused: That is the only main flaw in my opinion, taking it off reveals all mosfets covered in thermal paste and heatsinks which helps a lot when moving some voltage.

But look where the 24pin plug and more importantly the 4pin plug are, they are in the perfect locations, no wires hanging halfway down the board, even the IDE cable is at a angle so the cable comes away from the board and not directly upwards.

It has the on/off and reset switchs on the board itself, the northbridge and southbridge are also in perfect locations. But more importantly the ram slots and cpu socket are correct, I know there are a lot of fans of the DFI Expert layout but putting the cpu socket where the ram is can only harm case temperatures in my opinion as the heat gets caught in the middle and not exhausted out the back.

But the board is far from perfect as the floppy slot is in a awful place if you use a card in the bottem pci slot and the panel audio slots are at the back, has anyone had the perfect motherboard, I have had quite a few AMD/Intel boards and havent found one yet.
 
I've always thought it'd be nice to have a large capacity flash memory card that you could load the OS up from... instant booting, just like in the 8 bit days :) You used to get ROM boards years ago with operating systems on...
 
The things that annoy me the most when building pc's have really already been discussed, but I'll repeat them anyway, as I think they are popular enough to require re-iterating :)

Optical drives still use the ugly ide interface instead of sata. We have plenty of sata connectors on the board now so there's no excuse.

I'd say the same for floppy drives, but my last few systems don't even have them installed anymore :)

I always seem to get the "power" and "hdd" led front panel led connectors the wrong way round, so they never light up, and I can never be bothered to go through the hassle of trying to turn them round the other way. Connectors like reset/power/power led/hdd led should be all in one single connector, with one pin missing to ensure you can't put it in the wrong way round (like the USB/1394 connetors you see on some front panels).

Not really bothered about a button for clearing cmos, but I like the DFI's "Safeboot" feature where you can force the pc to bootup with default cmos settings, but without actually clearing the cmos. Lets you change back the one thing that stopped it booting last time, without having to do everything again.

Power/reset buttons on the motherboard are a great advantage even when the board is in the case, as they can be easier to reach, specially if your case has a door on the front.
 
Id like to see a bios chip that holds 2 bios's 1 that you can flash and 1 standard one, so if a flash goes bad you can flick a switch and get your machine up and running.

Any maybe some kinda led display to show rails on psu built into the board to check if the psu is ok.
 
Chaos said:
Id like to see a bios chip that holds 2 bios's 1 that you can flash and 1 standard one, so if a flash goes bad you can flick a switch and get your machine up and running.

Any maybe some kinda led display to show rails on psu built into the board to check if the psu is ok.
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Some gigabyte boards have 2 bios chips for that very reason
 
my little input so far,

Reset and power buttons on the mobo - dfi lanparty

Optical SATA drives - already sold but buggy and only work on a few mobos

Clear CMOS buttons - starting to be introduced but shouldnt have to ever do that :P

Sharp edges to be rounded - what sharp edges? go buy a decent case tbh

Universal clip for all cpus and heatsinks - will never happen intel dont like amd and vice vesa and with the new sockets...

All motherboards having a standard 'plug' for the front panel header - agreed

Retail dust filter that works 100% - agreed

3 or 4 sys_fan connectors - again dfi lanparty

A couple of plastic stand offs - dont realy see the need

A translucent motherboard, maybe with embedded LEDs - gimmic, cant be done anyway

Not having the front panel audio headers on the back of the motherboard! - agreed (near the I/O panel)

Cables that are easier to bend - you need to buy akasa cables

Colour coded mobo and cables - gigabyte do this but it looks naff

Good motherboard layout(placement of connectors and stuff) - very hard to do with dual graphics and so many ports, i recon e-atx needs to be moved to with so many onboard things but the dfi expert imo is bang on

Secure SATA plugs - never had the need for them, dfi cables and headers are quite hard to pull out of the socket.
 
Agr3sive said:
Do you work for DFI? :D
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no, i just reccomend good products, i cant fault my expert so far, stable as a rock, clocks well and looks good.

They also listen to the community, like ocz and gskill.
 
Yeah, I cant really fault DFI really, the 925X T2 board of theres was excellent, Like I said they were first to initiate the on/off and reset buttons on the board and they always give you loads of accessories in there full packages.

Its just a shame they havent made any 775 boards in a while, the last one they made as far as I know was a 945 matx board, Lets hope they bring something to the market soon.
 
DFI Ultra-D

i agree with the NB fan placement is really poor its right under my graphics card.. who the hell designed that? but other than that i love this board... especially the restart button :D
 
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