Actually many mother board maker's stopped using the protocols
They haven't STOPPED using them. You can't STOP using them, these are
hardware features implemented in the chipset itself and can't be disabled.
as they
were found to be next to useless and cause instability and give no
real world performance increase and on some systems actually decrease
the performance.
With early drivers and hardware yeah, but that was a long time ago now.
Sidebanding has been available since AGP was first released, and fastwrites
since the original GF256. That's a loooong time in the computer biz.