BGA Venting Thread ;)

The specs tell me all I need to know. No need to waste time testing it. I never said it wasn't suitable for people with limited financial resources or those that need something they can tuck under their arm as they scurry from one classroom to the next. All I said is that it is not an enthusiast product. Bottom line... it's not. It cannot be. It's not made with the right stuff to ever be.

How is it out of context? This is the BGA bashing thread. BGA deserves to be bashed because it is being taken out of context and masqueraded by scammers as something it is not, and hundreds of thousands of gullible customers are getting stiffed by crippled feces. Enjoy the Kool-Aid.

As I mentioned already many times. BGA has a place in this world. Something sold as a "high performance" product is not where it belongs. A poser machine with a big, thick chassis is not where it belongs. Ultrabooks... sure, why not, if that floats your boat. Got to make compromises when you have to save space... I get that. But, that boat sinks in my lake.

What's your favorite flavor? Cherry? Grape?

 

It's nice that I live close to Khenglish though.

If need anything soldered the shipping is dirt cheap lol.

 

Who or what gives you the right to decide whether or not a product is 'enthusiast'? The fact that you proclaim yourself to be an 'Undefiled BGA-Hating Elitist'? Pfft. Your P870 is lousy—how fast can it ray-trace a single scene in Renderman, for example? Your machine is a waste of money, energy and space. I've seen real power, and it puts your so-called 'enthusiast' machine to shame. Your 7700K and GTX 1080s will sit up and beg for mercy if I put a truly professional load on your machine. Good luck.

Who said anything about ultrabooks? See, my point is that neither you nor anyone else here have given me a straightforward answer to my question: what do you propose do about the range of notebooks that cost $800 to $1500, since you claim to represent and to want to wake up the masses, as you seem to imply here:

Most people only ever buy notebooks within that price range if they plan to game on a notebook. Your solution, 'buy a DTR' is non-viable. Price is an immediate deal-breaker for plenty of people.

Your only response is 'they're too cheap anyway, so why bother with LGA? Let them have the crappy parts...' That's a non-answer, and attemping to evade the question. Time and again the few of us who attempt to be professional and reasonable without resorting to superlatives and without attempting to swear but cannot in the face of NBR's rules (which means you sound childish, immature and salty) are shot down, with your stupid Americanism of 'drinking the Kool-Aid', without you ever providing a counter-argument or worthwhile suggestion. Furthermore, you don't own a BGA machine, it's none of your business what other people buy or not. You and plenty of others here already have DTRs with sockets and MXM, so why bring up mention of smaller notebooks in the first place? That's like someone with a Veyron ranting that people buy hybrids or EVs. Why do you care?

Refer to @iunlock's reply here. If that's not high-performance, I don't know what is.

You contradict yourself at every turn. Make up your mind.

 

You seem to be suffering from two incurable defects in thought process:

1. You assume that I am going to feel obligated to respond to your nonsense
2. You assume that I care what your opinion is

I can assure you that if my actions have not made this perfect clear, my words have just now given you the 20/20 focus you have been lacking thus far.

Sorry to have to be so blunt, but I'm actually doing you a solid favor by connecting the dots for you now. No need to burn any more calories on it, bro.

 

The reason people buy clevo machine is to get fun out of benchmark and overclocking.

It's not the most practical solution, yes, but you get enjoyment out of it.


Think of like buying a reasonable sports car (think clevos/msi/alienware) and tuning it to run on the drag strip. It certainly won't outrun the purpose-built funny cars and jet dragsters (think render farms). The sports car was never made to do that, but will compete along it's own class (think other gaming laptops).


There is no advantage to BGA. You can simply make the cheap cpus use PGA/LGA and mxm slot and nothing will be lost, you only gain advantage.
Weight and volume wise, the increase is insignificant.

 

Keep escaping the question

 

And you keep on talking about server rooms vs. notebooks. Oh well.
Btw. I haven't especially good up-download internet speed here home or with my cabin up in the mountains. I'm screwed And everybody have good or top notch up or download speed whatsoever they are? I learn something new everyday.

Exactly... NONE!! +rep

 

us6506148 b2

 

There is actually a fairly significant z height difference between a socket and a BGA chip when compared the thickness of the thinner
machines. It also makes it easier to manufacture via automation, improves signal integrity and reduces the footprint of the CPU on the motherboard as well.

 

https://www.google.com/patents/US6506148

 

Maybe this was not the absolute best thread to post about it, but that thing is real and it exists...

 

This is where the "tinfoil" hat, or better "Faraday protections" become useful.

Yeah, not so much related to BGA

 

And, those things actually have to matter before they matter. When they do not, BGA sucks.

Key words at 1:47 - [start] " Are not meant to be end user serviceable." [/stop] The End.

Evil intentions should never be rewarded with patronage.

 

Until they are needed to stay alive in the market like now.

 

You make plenty of valid points there, but this one I'd like to give some more perspective on. It's not really the Veyron crowd that you're thinking of. Those people will buy the most expensive thing they can because they can and when they're showing it off most of what they're showing off is how much they spent on their product, not the product themselves. What you're looking at here are more like the people who remember when you could get a fast/tunable car car/truck in every price range complaining that efficiency standards and market forces unrelated to their desires have forced them into a smaller and smaller selection of vehicles on the market. You probably know one or two of these folks IRL. They complain that cars are underpowered and made of plastic, blame "sheep" who have different priorities, maybe regulators for setting chemical/noise emission and efficiency standards, etc. If a product isn't aimed squarely at them they consider it universally useless and if such a product takes over the market share of something they like it's pretty much a war crime (see: Wrangler fans ranting about other Jeep models for one example). And when you look at it from their angle, and look past the name-calling and hyperbole, there is a valid point at the center of it: User-upgradable as a product selling point is going by the wayside in favor of black box, warranty void if looked at wrong, non-user-maintenance-friendly efficiency during use at any cost disposable packages of electronics and not everyone sees that as a good thing. As mentioned above with cars, products like that displacing products they can maintain/upgrade is the problem.

 

Since I run both BGA and LGA systems, I thought I'd offer some of my observations as well.

I have got BGA in my Macbooks and LGA in the incoming KM1 (had a P775DM3) before that. I will largely agree with what @Tanner@XoticPC said. When it came to making a decision, I had a choice between GT73 and P775DM3, and I decided to go with the DM3 option. Reason? Well in terms of weight and mobility, GT73 and DM3 (or the Asus 701L) are not any different and the desktop grade hardware in DM3 was a huge bonus for my requirements. Also, just two months into ownership, the 6700K was swapped for a 7700K, so that further cemented my belief that getting a socketed machine was the right decision. There was also the question of serviceability. In MSI's case, warranty would be void if I were to do a repaste etc.

I think BGA is perfectly fine in a machine like say XPS15. It is sort of an amalgamation of portability and performance. But those of us who want (out of a need or desire) a true desktop replacement, and willing to pay the penalty in terms of portability, socketed notebooks are the way to go as it is easier for a vast number of users to extract greater performance from the desktop CPUs than the mobile ones. Another factor to consider in this range is price. In UK, 775DM3 is actually cheaper than GT73, and I can get a reasonable 1080SLI and 7700K configuration from @John@OBSIDIAN-PC for about £700 less than the GT83. Now only if Intel could stop changing the platform socket every couple of generations, than the case for socketed CPUs would be even stronger.

Anyway, my central thesis is that while BGA has its place in more portable variety, let's say under 2.5kg, it is quite reasonable to expect socketed hardware in desktop replacement and high performance category. Especially considering that weight advantages, one of the main selling points for BGA machines, are not on offer in this category.

 

Part of the problem is that socket tech has not focused on mobile for some time, MXM for instance could be made to sit flush with the board to help reduce thickness.

 

Fair point, but where I live, even an entry-level Civic costs US$100,000 (yes, five zeroes), so efficiency is king. I live in a city, so hardly anyone cares about acceleration or nought-to-hundred. Has it got good mileage? That's always the question that's asked. Most people don't even bother buying cars here and just use public transport, which is cheap and good.

My main point was that @Mr. Fox, @Papusan et al. appear to be labouring under the impression that I think soldering CPUs and GPUs to motherboards is a good idea. Let me be very clear: No, it is not a good idea.

It is wasteful, and prompts replacement rather than repair. Environmentally speaking it is not the best solution. It discourages upgrades, and even perfectly-functioning machines, about four years old, are tossed into the rubbish because they're 'slow'. It locks users into purchasing the most powerful components initially, if they happen to need more performance down the road, making users spend more money than they need to.

I hardly need mention that soldering RAM and storage onto systems is a lousy idea.

My point is that when the frequent posters in this thread want 'information out to the public', and yet they're fine with compromises on small machines:

What about the AW13 and XPS 15 makes it okay to use BGA? The fact that they're small? Clevo released an 11" machine called the W110ER that had a PGA socket. My own notebook, a 13.3" one, has a PGA socket. And so on.

BGA has its place nowhere in the notebook world, where processing power matters, regardless of size, so pardon me, @dm477, but I think that your point of 'it's smaller, so BGA is okay' is plain wrong.

If thickness is a deal-breaker and weight is all that matters, then the ULV CPUs have no choice but to be BGA. And even then it is better if they were socketed or easily replaced in some way. The fact that Intel has made soldered CPUs a standard, from the lowest-powered thinnest ultrabooks to something like the P670HS or GT83VR is very regrettable. The predecessors to the P6 series of notebooks, the P1 series, had MXM slots and PGA sockets.

My point, time and again, is that there's no point ranting about it here, where it just echoes all around. We need to bring the argument to the big guns where we are more likely to be heard.

I ask you guys for a viable solution to BGA on smaller/cheaper machines, and I get dismissed as spouting 'nonsense' and my question is never answered.

 

I'm one of these people, but I also don't blame people for having small cars. Until they fail at attempting to overtake on country roads....

I'd say cars just aren't the best example, mostly because you have many options and age is less of a factor. ie, many many power builders have been using inexpensive Chev LSX engines for over 20 years now and they've been dropped into almost anything that can physically accommodate them (and some that don't ). That being said, the Veyron is a good comparison, because it IS (or was, there's the Chiron now) supposed to represent the pinnacle of engineering with the single goal of being the fastest production car, everything else be damned.

From what I know, a parallel (ie flat with the motherboard with MXM PCB at the same level) mount would require a significantly bigger connector for durability purposes. Generally speaking, you cannot mount something on the actual edge of the PCB as it's massively weaker. Instead you mount to the surface and put the connector itself at a right-angle (basically what we have now).

Theoretically you could get it mounted truly in parallel my using a significantly bigger connector which mounts from both sides of the PCB and sort of "clamps" on.

One of my suggestions a while back was to implement a "CPU Board". Basically an MXM for CPUs. You'd have to address the parallel mounting problem above, and you'd lose a lot of board density, but it could work.

In thin machines board density is the biggest problem. LGA or not, there's really not much room on the boards now. For thin/light machines (lets say anything up to a P650/P670 in thickness) I don't think there is decent way to keep the CPU upgrade-able in any way. If you sacrifice board density, that's precious space taken away from either the battery, or the heat sinks. Both of which are bad alternatives for those machines.

 

Well, hallelujah, I guess we do agree on a few things. That's nice. Thanks for clearing that up. I thought you said that BGA was acceptable, but perhaps I was mistaken. You know, coming right out and saying that is going to make the BGA-loving fanboys upset with you. BGA is appropriate only for cheap disposable electronics like smartphone and tablets, or $300 Walmart turdbooks. Beyond that, I think it's a real cop out by lame OEMs looking to screw every Facebook muppet willing to open their wallet for trash.

 

I honestly thought your account was hacked when I read this lol.

 

Well, I never really said that BGA was good. It is a compromise, rather unacceptable, and for the moment, non-negotiable.

 

I am very pleased you do not think it is good. That earns you a great deal of respect and proves your intelligence level is at or above average.

No need to negotiate. Just say no and walk away.

 

Could use a cutout in the board like they do for some batteries, with the plug on the edge.

 

Yeah, it's always weird when car analogies are brought up since you can't really make super old computers into modern machines just by dropping stuff in them.

Maybe if there were rails or something that it could slide into that run the length of the board?

 

They had ulterior motives and shifted their focus on way to make more money by making repairs and/or upgrades by end users difficult or impossible. The juvenile obsession with small form factors also required a new approach, and creativity is not something most ODMs are good at. Shortcuts are the norm... bang 'em out, cash the checks, and let somebody else deal with the fallout of engineering flaws and inferior designs.

That would work, but space (footprint) could still be problematic at 15-inch and smaller chassis.

 

You can blame Apple for the shift towards thin machines for the general population. I knew twenty years ago when they introduced those hideous iMac G3's that whatever product segment that company got into they would try to turn it from a tool into some kind of fashion statement. Pretty disappointing given that my first desktop and laptop was an Apple IIc and Powerbook 1400cs. Even now, I would say that I could type better on the P870KM's keyboard than I could on the new Macbook Pro keyboard. They may as well have done away with physical keys altogether and just put a giant touch panel. They don't even sell the base Thunderbolt 3 equipped 15 inch model without a dedicated GPU anymore, so your only performance option tiers are hot, burning, and sterilizing.

I think if Intel were to drop the K-series mobile processors, and support LGA designs in a notebook, then we might see a shift back to reality in terms of what enthusiast machines are built with. Idiots like Razer and Auros would still exist to the crowd that want their fashion statement, but I bet MSI, Asus, Acer and maybe even Alienware would switch back to using socketed products. Technically, the new Precision 7720 still uses MXM 3.0b, so not everybody over in Round Rock has completely lost their head.

 

Yeah, would pose some challenges for sure.

 

Holy crap, is that trade protection or just the cost of getting one there or both?

 

i3 processors that have gone from M to U termination have been stagnating for a while now and nowadays people buying a 7100U CPU will get a similar performance to a 3100M CPU and that ain't that okay. BGA is part of the problem and while some might not care about this one bit, it is a pity for those who wanted to spend little but still get decent power.

 

It has to do with the fact that Singapore has some absurd taxes on cars due to extremely limited space IIRC.

 

Indeed. The permit to even own a car is often times more than the price of the car itself.



::iunlock::

 

Don't know why that didn't occur to me, with the limited land mass. I was thinking like India where they want everything made there and put taxes on because of that.

 

Finally, Some very wise words. Thought I was dreaming when I read this. +rep

 

It was intel that decided to move away from sockets and intel don't care if they sell a BGA chip to be put on a motherboard or a socketed chip to plug in for a replacement.

 

As others have said, it's the total price of the car after adding in the price of the Certificate of Entitlement, which allows you to own and drive the car for exactly a decade (after which you have to fork out another thirty to fifty thousand to renew it), the 100% import tax on cars, plus the fuel tax.

As we Singaporeans say, if you're rich enough to buy a BMW, Merc or Audi in Singapore with your own money (they all cost roughly US$200,000 total), you can probably get a new Lamborghini in America and still have money to spare for a decently large house.

My father bought his Civic in late 2007 for about US$50,000. This August, he either has to pay a sum to renew his CoE, or scrap a perfectly good car. That being said, Singapore is small enough that nearly everyone can get by without a car.

As for LGA on notebooks... Why doesn't anyone seem to want a return of the notebook socket, PGA? In my opinion the older mobile processors were better for cooling as the copper was directly in contact with the silicon, and no delidding rubbish needed.

 

I would still prefer 91-100W chips vs. the older Extreme models with 55-57W

 

The extreme editions could have their TDPs upped but where expensive and the mobile sockets do limit pin count. Also intel do not want to ship any chips with pins.

 

One unexpected benefit for us of Intel phasing out the PGA sockets is that they can't charge you an arm and a leg for a PGA equivalent of the 7700K since it's the exact same part that goes into a desktop. Hell, even the BGA part tray prices are at a MINIMUM equal to what Intel charges for the top of the line consumer-grade CPU.

 

It being the exact same part has never stopped Intel charging more if they want to

It's just no one would solder a load of extreme editions to their boards and risk all that wastage.

 

I think the next mystery will be whether the smaller die size would be able to support high TDP's like we have now....

It's going to be interesting...as we are seeing it on laptops that are way too thin, I think we've already reached that point where 14nm is way too small for the die size.

Unless there is a major break through in technology...it would be nothing short of quantum physics if we get a die size smaller than 10nm that can handle high TDP...

We should put up a TUTO on how to shave off the pins on the Ryzen to make it compatible with the LGA socket. Of course add in to LM the entire socket first to ensure thorough coverage and contact.

For those of you into the Food World / Foodies, it's like when ice burg lettuce was once something restaurants would throw away and discarded....

Now it has become a delicacy and served in 5 star restaurants...a little ranch, blue cheese and topped with bacon bits....$15 for an appetizer of what once used to end up in the rubbish.

BGA-CPU's like the horrific HQ are along the lines of the same thing...it's that ice burg lettuce, except that it needs to be topped with marketing hype and ignorant consumers who follow the flashing lights, walking into hypnosis willing to pay full price.

Also to add, since this is a completely different jurisdiction from the brand specific forums, for the record, I don't pay full price for any of my bga machines lol...not even close. I wouldn't in a million years pay that price tag. One would be shocked at the deals that are possible and trust me... even the most extreme bga advocate would take one for what I pay for them...in case some of you were wondering, "why all the bga machines?" LOL...sensible purpose and practicality for the right sensible price.

There's a difference between ignorant / naive and spending top dollar on something that is not worth top dollar VS being aware and spending only a fraction of the cost on something and not ever feeling a buyers remorse for a purchase that wasn't worth it.

.

 

I have not been a fan of die shrinks for a good while now. The talking heads make it sound like something special, but history paints a slightly different picture for us. I think die shrinks will continue be more and more problematic for those that value performance and enjoy competitive overclocking. A low TDP CPU cannot provide amazing performance, at least in the context of the enthusiast arena, and small die size has trouble handling high TDP. We have already seen some evidence that die shrinkage is taking us the opposite direction of where some of us want to go, and I doubt that is going to do anything except worsen. This is where the bang for buck and cost per clock arguments start to unravel. It doesn't matter if a particular processor offers equal or better cost per clock performance ratio when it lacks the capacity to compete with something that has theoretically unlimited TDP and more overclocking headroom. The fact that it can compete until it reaches the point that it peters out and gets left behind becomes irrelevant (a lame excuse) and the rationale that it is just as good goes right out the window.

Now we are at a point when it is not even possible to offer cost-to-performance ratio rationale because that's also all jacked up. When there is no cost savings (as we see today) and the inferior part has limitations the better part does not, but sells for the same price as the better part, I view that as tragedy and failure. Instead of shrinking dies, they should leave them alone, or make them larger, and pack more awesomeness into them... higher TDP, more cores, etc. Making them smaller "just because" or based on conventional wisdom (AKA popular stupidity) is kind of retarded.

 

I agree. It'd be nice if the die size stopped right at 14nm so that they would have to revert going the other way lol.

It would also be nice if somehow the ODM's were forced to go the other way as well...

 

Wow..

Die shrink leads to 2 very big things:

1. Increased transistor density
2. Transistor switching with less current

These things literally translate into more performance per watt. And what history are you even talking about? GPUs are a prime example of die shrink benefits at work. Every shrink increases transistor count significantly and performance has jumped massively every time. Just look at the Nvidia top tier cards over the last few shrinks and perf/watt has scaled almost linearly each time. AMD has seen the same benefits (albeit less frequently). More transistors = more switching = more calculations = more work done.

On the CPU side the benefits are less pronounced for consumers because Intel have actually made every jump on a more regular basis. Furthermore most pc performance "enthusiasts" are actually just gamers who don't even see the big picture.

Look at the server world where core-count matters and things are VERY different. Each die shrink has allowed huge jumps in core count and the perf jumps are there as well. That's not to say that single-core performance hasn't jumped though, literally every generation has increased performance relative to the process shrink. Literally every CPU generation has been faster than the last....

There are real physical limits to how fast a transistor can switch and you can't just keep pumping voltage into infinity to make it switch faster.

"Theoretically unlimited TDP" is possibly one of the silliest things I've ever read. It would require "theoretically unlimited power" for starters, which is just absurd.


As far as overclocking, it's rather simple. As the process shrinks, so do the tolerances. As tolerances shrink, so do the variances in each chip. With fewer variances they can come out of the factory far closer to their maximum potential. A "highly overclockable" part, when you actually think about it, implies a larger variance in manufacturing which is actually a bad thing. This is why the "silicon lottery" will become less of a thing. Pascal GPUs really put this into perspective for many.

I certainly get the "tuner" mentality of getting more out of your chip. But to suggest that the chip itself should be purposely made inferior (which is exactly what is required for overclocking to be meaningful) is patently ridiculous.

 

What, your laptop isn't tokamak powered? Literally feces.

Am I doing that right?

 

I think the shrinking is definitely good for overall performance. You're right that it hurts enthusiasts who want to OC somewhat, but I'd rather have higher stock performance as time goes on. And that has been increasing.

I do agree I'd rather have a large die, that would be a large boost.

 

I don't think anyone would want a 180nm 1080, it would take up most of the system lol.

 

Never know what people will buy, just have to market it right.

 

When it only clocks to 400mhz and generates 2kw of heat then they would not want it over a modern design