Laptop Motherboard

[Radicool]

So I just found out that a motherboard and a chipset are NOT the same thing. I noticed websites only show which chipset they have, but never comment on which motherboard it uses. Why is this? I need to know the FSB speed since performance is important in a gaming laptop.

http://www.asus.com/au/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/G75VW/#specifications

Just wondering if I missed it, but I'm pretty sure the motherboard is nowhere to be found. All websites, like this one, don't mention which motherboard it uses.

 

[Velmarshal]

Why is the laptop motherboard so important to you? Motherboards have neligible impact on performance.

The reason they dont list the mobo isprobably because its almost irrelevant to the performance and the fact that they are custom made for pretty much every laptop series and sizes.

 

[Radicool]

The motherboard connects everything together. I thought everything would theoretically be bottle necked by the FSB (Front Side Bus) speed. I know with desktops you can spend heaps and heaps on them. I thought it was more so a performance gain. So motherboards aren't important at all in terms of performance?

 

[Velmarshal]

It doesn't affect performance, well not in a notable way.
FSB\BCLK are locked to 100Mhz on all new intel CPUs, overclockers manage to get up to 105Mhz, but thats about it. (I managed to get a 103.9Mhz but to be honest it's not worth the extra 3% of performace).

 

[Radicool]

Ok, I'll stop wasting my time trying to find motherboard specs, haha. Thanks heaps. Btw, why are motherboards locked to such a low MHZ? 100 seems kinda low.

 

[Velmarshal]

The Intel CPUs are locked to 100mhz, mobo manufacturers just follow intel specifications.

Well it's been a while since read about how mobos work, for example, there are no northbridges or southbridges anymore, as i remember fsb used to affect the northbridge.

You can always use google if you need a more indepth explanations.

 

[Adiktuz]

Mobo's would probably only be of importance to you if you're gonna build a new PC from scratch (since you want to make sure that your other parts especially the CPU can be placed into that motherboard)... but for buying laptops, yeah it's quite not important

 

[Velmarshal]

Mobo's would probably only be of importance to you if you're gonna build a new PC from scratch (since you want to make sure that your other parts especially the CPU can be placed into that motherboard)... but for buying laptops, yeah it's quite not important

Well, these days people go for 4 common categories. Cheapest mobos with 2 ram slots and a barebone chipset, less cheap mobos with 4 ram slots (crossfire support is common) and a mediocre chipset, mobos with high quallity chipsets meant for overclocking (usually they have both sli and crossfire support) and top end mobos with gold plated connectors, spaceage cappacitors and so on.

With laptops nobody lists the mobo, because whatever mobo the laptop has, you wont have an alternative and usually what matters is the maximum ram cappacity. Chipsets are almost always barebone to reduce the power consumtion, the one flaw that plagued laptops since their introduction, which only started to change recently with high efficiency processors such as the Intel's Atom Bay trail.