I went on the ASUS site recently to download a driver. After narrowing down the search to LGA775 motherboards, I had to navigate a list of 200 different models to find mine (I counted). What is the sense in it??? Who needs so many permutations? And how do the companies justify all the cost of creating the various PCBs, testing them, supporting them, and even printing cardboard boxes.
Why do automobile manufacturers make so many frikkin models?
Why do television manufacturers make so many frikkin models?
Why do clothing manufacturers make so many frikkin models?
Because the differences, while insignificant to you and me, are important to others.
Are they the same basic models, with different features added on or not? That might not require that much manufacturing mojo.
They don’t. They just use a bunch of different model numbers so that they don’t have to describe every board as “Windows Vista 64-bit compatible motherboard with 4 DDR2 memory slots and Creative Audigy 6x4 onboard sound but no onboard video and only three Firewire ports, but 12 USB 2.0 ports…”
On the other hand, there should be a generic driver suite that covers all those models, then. I’d be willing to bet that most of the links the OP described actually went to the same place ultimately.
Probably. My last two mainboards were from AOpen and MSI and both make you hunt through dozens of fiddly chipset names in order to give you a link to one of two downloads. :smack:
Because people do actually want the various permutations of motherboards and are willing to pay money for them. Many moons ago, I worked ASUS tech support part-time. The most common inquiries regarding feature sets were related to:
-Processor support
-Memory support/max. memory size
-Form factor
-Chipset type
-Hard drive support on the built-in HD controller (this was in the days of PIO-4/DMA/UltraDMA33/66/100 and onboard SCSI)
Even if you consider two or three possible choices for each of the above, that still translates to quite a number of possible combinations, all in demand to one degree or another.
True, but they don’t really need that many “models.” To the end user, all that matters are the known specs, and a driver identification. That shouldn’t actually be that hard, but mobo makers are used to a much older way of doing business. These days, it’s a nightmare just finding out what frickin mobo you’ve got. Wait, that never was different anyhow.
Why not have multiple models? The market is pretty fragmented: home, raid vs no raid, form factor, controllers, server class, ecc support, etc.
Every so often there’s a new chipset or a fabrication shrink or some new hot feature, etc. Not to mention rev A, rev B, etc.
Nerds are a demanding bunch and want the bleeding edge. If ASUS werent able to match market demand then they would simply go out of business. The PC industry runs on releasing multiple products per quarter and showing them off in trade shows. If your company doesnt have a hot new product then its in trouble.
Read me carefully: I was more suggesting that the end user should not need to know at all what the model actually is. Just stick a nice tough label that gives the driver ID (and make it something simple). The drivers should be able to automatically put in what it needs from there.
I’m confused. What’s the difference between the “driver ID” and the model number?
A new chipset comes out and a board is made for all the other chipset component combinations. Somebody into building computers would understand why they do this. It only seems like a lot because there are so many manufactures of motherboards and each one does this. The hobbyists want these choices and there is money to be made supplying all these choices.
As for MSI they have a program that will check all drivers and software they supplied for your model motherboard and download then install the divers and software. You don’t need to look for the drivers yourself. I really like MSI and their update support.
One manufacturer, for one type of CPU (ok, socket), has 200 different models. Of course a manufacturer needs several combinations. Maybe a dozen. Maybe two. But 17?!
It’s the damn scale of the thing. And while it might be nice to have a model for every single possibility, most industries are constrained by cost factors to act more reasonably. Yet the motherboard makers are nothing if not constrained by cost, yet they do this. So for one, they must be enormously efficient. For another, insane? Brilliant?
Well, you could go the opposite direction with it, like Nvidia did (does?) with their graphics card drivers… bundle them all together and let the installation program identify which drivers to install.
It was a pretty clever method of eliminating the problem, but downloading 40MB of unnecessary drivers is a real bitch if you’re on dialup. 
Someone is enough of a techie to build his own computer, but his modem is a dialup? Sounds unlikely to me. Perhaps dialup is the only thing available in his area, in which case I sympathize with what he’s gotta put up with.
Multiple ‘models’ (as they’re currently defined) can use the same driver, therefore have the same driver ID, so there would be far fewer driver IDs than there are model numbers.
That said, model numbers are still useful for the reasons outlined in the first answers. If you go online to ask someone what’s wrong with your computer, it’s far easier to give a motherboard model number so that people can find out the exact spec of your motherboard than to give a whole list of specs some of which might not be relevant.
There is CPU, Video, IO chipset, Memory, and form factor and quality of the board components as the main choices. Next you looking at the combination of peripheral connections. Catering to say the hobbyists would disappoint the cheap people because their computer won’t be $300 like they want. The hobbyists wouldn’t buy from the manufacture of cheap boards for cheap people because it would suck for what hobbyist do. There are also motherboards for the server market and there are always the compromises between the best and worst. If you can’t see how doing these combination’s can give you 17 boards I can’t help you.
Well, it happened to me, but as I said this was some time ago.
While I’m not going to disagree with the statement that things appear to be far more complicated than they need to be, mb manufacturers aren’t as constrained by cost as you might think. Much of development is completely automated in the design programming.
A little over simplified, but once the specs for basic board are in the system, the system will know what to do to spit out build instructions for AGP, PCIE, and SLI capable system boards. The same level of automation is present for BIOS builds. AGP interface gets the AGP module linked into the compile, PCIE gets PCIE, etc.
Much, or even most, of the complexity is driven by the market. I swear by certain chipsets and architecture and swear at others. Someone else is going to be the complete opposite. No manufacturer is going to cut off a segment of their customer base unless it’s just almost financial suicide. They know better than to try to say X chipset is better than Y, here’s the numbers that prove it when the user’s response is going to be screw the numbers, I’ve got experience.
All that being said, locating drivers and firmware is a total PITA. I know there are programs that will manage drivers and let me know when updates are available, but prices are more than the convenience is worth to me.
I’ve got a dumb question: why are all you people looking to update drivers all the friggin’ time? The drivers come on the disk with the motherboard for Windows, and are generally built into Linux, or are installed automatically on an Apple. Sure, sometimes I get bit by an early pre-release video driver bug, but one it’s fixed, it’s fixed. I’ve never had to hunt and search for new northbridge drivers, USB drivers, nor any of the other routine stuff.