Custom Engineered Motherboards

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

I noticed the Z170 mobos have a lot of interesting problems. like few M.2 connections, poor GPU slot configuration, weird m.2/GPU mutual-exclusivity...

as an electrical engineer, I was wondering if any companies offer custom PCB/Motherboard configurations? If not, why not? I appreciate that the cost would be quite high for a single motherboard, and troubleshooting problems down the road might be difficult. Any other thoughts?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

You got me thinking ...

With recent development in both stretchy circuit boards and bendable display panels I can imagine some funky paper towel roller shaped mothertubes (tube, not board) with the attached peripherals coming off the tube.

 

[Mr Evil]

DFI will make one for you. Given that motherboards are 8-layers or so, large and complex, I'm guessing the price for a one-off will be flabbergasting.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always thought this would be kind of neat. I always find it hard to find the motherboard I want, like with enough of a certain kind of PCIe slot, ram slots, sata slots etc...

Like imagine a server grade motherboard with like 24 ram slots and 26 sata ports(24 hot swap + OS + cdrom) and maybe like 4 pce16 slots (for quad nics or something). Throw in 2-4 cpu sockets for good measure.

But yeah I imagine this would be very expensive. Only viable if you are selling or using lot of systems then you can have mobos tailored to your exact needs and not worry about supply running out or changing on you. Design a 1 board fits all scenario, order like 1 mil and when you run out, if they are working well then order more etc. Now days companies only seem to make a handful of a certain motherboard or any part for that matter till they have a different revision or discontinue it altogether, so if you are trying to mass build PCs/servers it can prove to be an issue especially if you need systems that are identical and need to add more identical systems over time or you simply want to sell a product that is consistent.

 

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

motherboards we buy from msi or asus are the price they're at because of volume scaling. it took a team of engineers and certification to design the boards.

 

[destrekor]

You got me thinking ...

With recent development in both stretchy circuit boards and bendable display panels I can imagine some funky paper towel roller shaped mothertubes (tube, not board) with the attached peripherals coming off the tube.

mothertubes :awe:

My favorite interpretation of bendable displays for a tablet was shown on the TV series Caprica. It was essentially a rigid tube, and the display was pulled out from it (so it was rolled up in the tube when not in use). It was also fully transparent or at least translucent. I think once pulled out it had some rigidity, but I can't remember.

I so want a tablet like that. It's slightly more practical than a standard tablet, but it's mostly just awesome. It is at least far more practical than a tablet, and the display is entirely protected when not in use, so as tablets go, it is definitely a major evolution, but it's still a tablet so functionality is limited compared to other computing platforms. That said, so much can be done on tablets that depending on your workflow (or, you know, just media consumption and communication), it could be perfect. I'd use a roll-up tablet solely like a smartphone, minus the phone part, but as communications evolve, it would be a great video call platform and in general great for text-based communication and media consumption.

 

[freeskier93]

I noticed the Z170 mobos have a lot of interesting problems. like few M.2 connections, poor GPU slot configuration, weird m.2/GPU mutual-exclusivity...

as an electrical engineer, I was wondering if any companies offer custom PCB/Motherboard configurations? If not, why not? I appreciate that the cost would be quite high for a single motherboard, and troubleshooting problems down the road might be difficult. Any other thoughts?

That's an Intel issue, they just don't have enough PCIE lanes on the consumer CPUs.

It's costing me about $350 to get two 5"x6" 4 layer boards manufactured with a couple fine pitch microcontrollers pre stuffed. So about $175 per board in just manufacturing, probably another $20 in components that I'll be soldering on. I paid like $110 for my Asus Z97 board.

The main issue is part cost. The 3 parts (per board) we're having stuffed we could get for about $3, but is costing us about $90 because the manufacturer needs 6" of tape to feed the machines. Since our project isn't budget constrained it's worth it to us to pay this and not fuck around with soldering fine pitch microcontrollers on this revision.

 

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

You probably weren't looking for this, but did they offer volume pricing of any kind? I'd like to get Eagle and produce some 4-8 layer computer bits to do fun things with around the house and in my car, maybe show off to an employer later. I'm hoping I can find some pre-drawn diagrams of a sandy bridge motherboard to work with.

 

[Juventas]

Motherboards are all customizable... with cards! I know, not what you had in mind, but its easy and inexpensive to go from a PCIe slot to 4-lane M.2.

 

[mindless1]

motherboards we buy from msi or asus are the price they're at because of volume scaling. it took a team of engineers and certification to design the boards.

Yeah, that's why I wonder about your question as the "why not" would be that small run, let alone single run pricing is too high for manufacturers to bother offering it, too little if any market for that.

I'm hoping I can find some pre-drawn diagrams of a sandy bridge motherboard to work with.

For sale or free? Wouldn't they be giving away their work and intellectual property?

 

[MrTeal]

Costs wouldn't be terrible. I've produced ATX sized boards with 10 layers and relatively fine (6/6) trace/space, and a proto run of 10 would cost 5-8000 for the board and assembly. MB components would obviously also be more expensive in low qty, but the manufacturers most likely buy the vast majority of those in qty anyway.

The real cost would be the Engineering time required to do the custom board. Anything more complex than replacing the PCIe slots with purple UV reactive ones would almost instantly eclipse the actual hardware cost.

 

[mindless1]

^ So taking the low end, $5K for board and assembly + engineering time eclipsing that =
$10K+ for a motherboard... not terrible at all.

It's the first one that's expensive. The rest not so much.

 

[pitz]

Even most of the custom motherboards that are spun for Google/Facebook, are merely existing designs, with extraneous components omitted (ie: no need for sound DACs or a full compliment of unpopulated PCI-E slots for machines that will sit on racks in the datacentre!).

So no, custom engineering for a motherboard makes very little sense. Best to leverage the capabilities of the mass-market design and testing community, than to try and have an astronomically expensive one-off.

If you really want more M.2 connectors, I'm sure if you look around hard enough, there's some outfit out there that has done up some fancy PLX-chip-based test board that you can buy. Similar to how one can buy PLX-based full-sized PCI-E cards that provide 4 miniPCI-E connectors. Pricey (well not really), but a heck of a lot cheaper than custom engineering!

 

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

So it looks like there already are PLX'd SSDs in raid 0 as a single unit!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10555/seagate-introduces-10gbs-pcie-ssd-and-60tb-sas-ssd

 

[Rifter]

I noticed the Z170 mobos have a lot of interesting problems. like few M.2 connections, poor GPU slot configuration, weird m.2/GPU mutual-exclusivity...

as an electrical engineer, I was wondering if any companies offer custom PCB/Motherboard configurations? If not, why not? I appreciate that the cost would be quite high for a single motherboard, and troubleshooting problems down the road might be difficult. Any other thoughts?

Most of your listed issues are not with mobo design but with intels locking out of PCIe lanes from the mainstream platform. Look into the HEDT platform and you will not have any PCIe lane issues.

 

[William Gaatjes]

motherboards we buy from msi or asus are the price they're at because of volume scaling. it took a team of engineers and certification to design the boards.

This indeed, that certification alone costs an arm and a leg.
For the layout part, You have to do trace length matching a lot with motherboards with x mils tolerance to keep the skew to a minimum. For example 20 mills. 1 mill is 2.54 cm/1000.
And the traces may only be so long. And every via adds emi / emc issues. Good software calculates that for you with an easy to use analyze tool. But it costs a lot.

 

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

thanks guys! I'm no longer interested in doing my own motherboard, although small scale stuff still looks exciting.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

pandaminer made a custom stripped down mobo that mounts 8 mobile rx480s for crypto mining in a custom case.

no idea of cost or what their production run was but it seems solid. bunch of crypto guys have em.

review thread at bitcointalk.. longish thread but plenty of pics, including shots of the mobo, just keep scrolling..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1733723.0

just though some might find it interesting.