I had the same feeling of disappointment when Intel exited the consumer motherboard business. I bought one of their Ivy Bridge generation motherboards for my PC build at the time because it was the only one that I could confirm had the features I wanted. The motherboard manual listed details like the part numbers for the SuperIO, Firewire and audio chips, the location of the temperature sensors on the board, the current ratings for the fan headers. I knew exactly what I was getting, and knew there was no reason to shell out for a more "high end" motherboard because there wouldn't have been any improvement to any functionality I cared about.
Man do I miss the days of DFI motherboards when their engineers would pop into the overclocking community and share code snippets of relevant BIOS firmware. The things were so well documented there were something like 3 or 4 third-party BIOS distributions.
Then there was their community and RMA manager Dona. That woman had to be one of the hardest working people I've ever encountered. She must have slept like 5 hours a day. People could post on some obscure forum about a defect and she'd find the post and make it right. One time, when I was around 16 in 2007, I broke a very niche and specific overclocking record on DDR2 latency that still passed Memtest x86, and Dona hooked me the hell up. Suddenly started getting all sorts of companies sending me heatsinks, RAM, PSU's, etc to "review" if I wanted to. Sidenote to this tangent - I have to say, the ultra-fine grit sandpaper kit with 12 sheets in increasing grit, was absolutely my favorite. Learned how to sand a heatsink down to a near mirror finish and shaved a few degrees celsius off my de-capped AMD Opteron 165.
DFI BIOS were famous for exposing the most settings for regulating RAM/ CPU/ Chipset/ GPU/ SATA/ PCI-E/ IDE communication and lanes. This guide/ participating in the DFI overclocking community probably taught me more about the fundamentals of computer science, and how all those electrons move around to make the sand think. https://forums.overclockersclub.com/topic/100835-the-definit...
I’m guessing we are of similar age. I also had similar experiences and remember Dona. Looking back the DFI boards were ridiculously good as an overclocker there wasn’t anything you couldn’t learn about and tweak. I feel like that was the golden age of performance consumer hardware.
Fond memories of that time period, hanging out on BlazingPC and other forums. Back then my primary setup was cooled with a Vapor phase change machine if I remember right. Hummed along at about -60 Celsius under load and was super stable even at close to 5ghz I think it was. I also had a bunch of Kayl GPU & CPU pots which meant I was always chomping at the bit to do dry ice / ln2 sessions and crank out a few digits of pi. Now I have an M1 Max, how boring.
Thanks for reminding me cududa. Sounds like we may have competed for a few records back in the day
