Legacy free motherboards

Hardware backwards compatibility is getting a little out of hand. The latest OS's are parting ways with a lot of old hardware and software, but motherboard manufacturers keep making all their boards with serial ports (or at least headers) and other out-of-date standards. Fear is probably the motivator, as the last well-known legacy-free board from Abit sold horribly. But that was years ago, and the situation is completely different now. Most households no longer have just one computer: if you really need to keep using your old Palm III organizer and its serial-port-based dock, keep it with the old computer - chances are it wouldn't play nice with the new OSs anyway. And even disregarding that advice, no one said that a motherboard manufacturer has to make their entire lineup legacy free.

Whats the big deal? Needless complexity and cost. Power consumption for all these extra controllers also suffers slightly. I suggest a completely legacy-free motherboard for the mid-range market, P55 chipset would be ideal, somewhere b/t $150-$200 (ASUS? Gigabyte? Are you listening?) No serial, no parallel, no PS/2, no IDE, no PCI, no floppy. Load up the backplate with USB, powered eSATA, firewire jacks, a cmos reset button, etc. Why no ethernet or audio? You'll see why below...


I racked my brain what would be the optimal legacy free (i.e. all PCI-E) layout for a 7 slot ATX design. The napkin is the result of that brain-racking. While I think 2-card SLI/Crossfire is WAY overstated (it's insisted on almost every enthusiast board, yet a relatively small percentage ever actually take advantage of the ability, and 3-way is practically unheard of in real life), a 2-card, 2-slot-each setup is something that should be carefully considered in the layout. Since most performance graphics cards are 2-slot designs, the slot immediately under each 16x slot can just remain blank (helps simplify the trace design too). Since you want room for airflow as well, the video cards should have a third slot relatively unobstructed. The top card will only have a 1x card to possibly "block" the airflow, but considering the position of most video card fans, and the length of most PCI-E 1x cards, this is, in most cases, a non-issue. The bottom video card still has a bit of room past the edge of the motherboard in most cases to breathe, so no problem there either.

Now it's just a matter of taking advantage of the 6 available PCI-E lanes in the P55 chipset. In retrospect it might be better to have the 4x slot to be in between the 1x slots, to give a card like the 9800GT room to breathe. Also, might as well just make the slot physically a 16x slot instead of a open-ended 4x, just to give a videocard better support. As for the two left over lanes, put small riser cards in them, one dedicated to sound, and one dedicated to network (wireless and wired in one riser card would be cool). You could then also disable the onboard sound or onboard network controller if you wanted to use your own. This is why I suggested not even bothering putting sound or ethernet on the backpanel. Enthusiasts often (at least more often then using a serial or parallel port device!) have their own sound or network cards they want to use, so why waste valuable backpanel space?

Post your thoughts. And motherboard makers: Are you listening?