beginning of the end for upgrades

As far as the PC OEMs are concerned, killing off the PC upgrade market would be a good thing because it would push people to buy new PCs rather than upgrade their existing hardware. The PC industry is currently stagnant, partly because consumers and enterprise are making existing hardware last longer.

http://www.zdnet.com …us-7000008024/?s_cid=e539

I guess China Inc. will be especially happy as consumers will have no choice of buying anything but cheap proprietary junk they offer us. Similar to what has happened with Mp3 players and portable TV's you either spend rediclous money for name brand or you get a product that self destructs in a year.

Seems like technology keeps going backwards as more and more devices now have non removable batteries, bootloaders are locked, memory is soldered in, drives and other bits becoming non replaceable, many devices lack storage card slots and we need bulky and expensive cases to protect our thin delicate devices.

Just imagine some day soon telling someone, "It looks like your soldered down memory has a couple of bad cells keeping your computer from booting. Your motherboard is toast. Since the SSD is soldered down too, I have no way to access your data. I hope you have a backup. You can send it to Ontrack and pay $3000"

As long as the consumer favors form over function I'm afraid you're right.

Yea I saw this too.... Going the way of Apple Airs and Retina Displays units....

Before you know it youll be buying motherboards with processors soldered on there and memory soldered too.

ben_r_ wrote in post #15309936
Yea I saw this too.... Going the way of Apple Airs and Retina Displays units....

Before you know it youll be buying motherboards with processors soldered on there and memory soldered too.

And glued to the back of a monitor so you get to replace your beautiful 30" screen when the RAM or SSD goes bad. Brilliant!

Intel is coming out with new chips that will be soldered onto the mobo. Many ultra books now have soldered in SSD. I hate that. I like being able to change things.

This is so they can make devices smaller and cheaper by designing there hardware to be able to only support there ram, gpu and cpu . Also without having to make ways to change hardware. This will never happen with desktops but I don't know about Macs.

But if you think about it, when someone upgrades their processor, they usually upgrade their motherboard as well. So integrating motherboard and processor might not be bad thing either.

RHChan84 wrote in post #15312735
But if you think about it, when someone upgrades their processor, they usually upgrade their motherboard as well. So integrating motherboard and processor might not be bad thing either.

Integrating components makes sense when it lowers the cost. I remember when you needed separate cards for serial+parallel, IDE, LAN, sound, and video. Now motherboards integrate all of those and the total cost is less than getting them all separately. And thankfully desktop boards still have room to replace any on-board I/O that might fail or become obsolete.

The CPU is typically a pretty expensive component. When I did my last major upgrade a year ago, I spent $130 on a motherboard and $300 on a CPU. Does this new move by Intel mean that the whole package is only going to cost $130 including the CPU? I doubt it. The way it is now, if the motherboard fails, I'm not out a $300 CPU too.

mike_d wrote in post #15312986
Integrating components makes sense when it lowers the cost. I remember when you needed separate cards for serial+parallel, IDE, LAN, sound, and video. Now motherboards integrate all of those and the total cost is less than getting them all separately. And thankfully desktop boards still have room to replace any on-board I/O that might fail or become obsolete.

The CPU is typically a pretty expensive component. When I did my last major upgrade a year ago, I spent $130 on a motherboard and $300 on a CPU. Does this new move by Intel mean that the whole package is only going to cost $130 including the CPU? I doubt it. The way it is now, if the motherboard fails, I'm not out a $300 CPU too.

That is true. But then again, how often does a Mobo go out? It does go out but not often? I usually see the BIOs battery go out and someone installed it wrong or did it with the power on and shorted something out or maybe someone just has their PC hooked up to an outlet without protection and power surge shorts something out. But on normal usage, very very rare from what I have seen but I'm not in IT so they might say different.

I would like to see real world test when they do start selling the integrated Mobo and processor and how it performed to a similar PC with the similar MoBo and Processor.

mike_d wrote in post #15312986
Integrating components makes sense when it lowers the cost. I remember when you needed separate cards for serial+parallel, IDE, LAN, sound, and video. Now motherboards integrate all of those and the total cost is less than getting them all separately. And thankfully desktop boards still have room to replace any on-board I/O that might fail or become obsolete.

The CPU is typically a pretty expensive component. When I did my last major upgrade a year ago, I spent $130 on a motherboard and $300 on a CPU. Does this new move by Intel mean that the whole package is only going to cost $130 including the CPU? I doubt it. The way it is now, if the motherboard fails, I'm not out a $300 CPU too.

Exactly! The only reason they want to do this is because itll be cheaper for THEM to produce and give them more control. Theyll still charge the same or more for the price, especially since they control both components now.

We need to vote with our dollars and NOT buy this stuff!

ben_r_ wrote in post #15320721
Exactly! The only reason they want to do this is because itll be cheaper for THEM to produce and give them more control. Theyll still charge the same or more for the price, especially since they control both components now.

We need to vote with our dollars and NOT buy this stuff!

I've been using Intel motherboards and of course Intel CPUs for a long time. I prefer a board that's easy to configure over having 10,000 tweaking options that might squeeze out another 5% in performance but could compromise stability. But I'll switch to AMD in a heartbeat if they let me keep building what I want.

RHChan84 wrote in post #15313976
That is true. But then again, how often does a Mobo go out? It does go out but not often?

A lot more than you think. I work at a CC and we have roughly 10% of a given qty of new computers where something on the MB will go bad that necessitates changing the whole board. Since consumers only but at most 2 at a time, you wont really notice the frequency, but for corporate, or academic that buys hundreds to thousands, you very quickly see a much higher failure rate. Yes they are under warranty, but the number is higher than you think.

mike_d wrote in post #15320757
I've been using Intel motherboards and of course Intel CPUs for a long time. I prefer a board that's easy to configure over having 10,000 tweaking options that might squeeze out another 5% in performance but could compromise stability. But I'll switch to AMD in a heartbeat if they let me keep building what I want.

Oh but you know itll only be a matter of time before AMD will do the same thing too.

ben_r_ wrote in post #15321628
Oh but you know itll only be a matter of time before AMD will do the same thing too.

I'm not sure if AMD has the industry clout to pull a BS move like this.