Goddamn computers
I am thinking of replacing my motherboard. The USB on it is damn near completely non-functional, and the addon USB card I purchased to try and make up for the fact that my motherboard’s USB support eats it isn’t much better. I can’t even get my Logitech Mouseman Optical to work on the onboard ports, and when I have it connected to the add-on ports, the OS fails to recognize it about 1 out of every 3 boots. I then have to crawl behind the computer and disconnect and reconnect the mouse a few times until it lights up.
My motherboard (Asus P2B-DS) has been perfect in every other respect, the onboard Ultra2 SCSI works great, I could use a few more PCI slots, but whatever. In replacing the board, however, I have a few demands:
- Onboard Ultra(2 or 3) SCSI
- Dual Slot 1
- Support for all the Pentium IIIs (my current board only supports up to 500Mhz or so)
- Isn’t completely outdated…
I don’t think that these requests are unreasonable, but apparently the motherboard manufacturers do… There are three boards I have found that are close to these specifications. All of them have limitations:
- Tyan Tiger 133 - Lacks SCSI, but has pretty much everything else. I could get this board and a Adaptec 2940U2B for about \$200 and be done with it. It is apparently no longer made by Tyan, but I still see it all over the place.
- Tyan Thunderbolt - Everything plus the kitchen sink…. The major disadvantages are that it costs around \$375 and only has a 100Mhz FSB
- AOpen DX6G Plus - Everything I am looking for (plus an Ethernet controller), but it only has a 100Mhz FSB (and apparently doesn’t run with PC133 memory installed)
Does anyone have any suggestions? At this point I am just thinking of waiting a little while and just starting from scratch again….