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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (92318)	1/15/2003 6:36:34 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Jim, - SCSI controller - Extra IDE controller...nice to run things like Zip drives off of. - RAID Ok, suppose one would apply (for one slot), I can't imagine more than one, on top of 4 IDE and however many SATA devices. -Audiophile sound card. Ok, 2. High end video card...onboard gForce won't be cutting edge. (AGP slot) You said it, AGP slot. So we are up to 2 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot. With MicroATX, you would still have one available. Suppose you need a Gigabit Ethernet card. Basically extremely high 90s percentage of users would have to go out f their way to fill in the 3 PCI plus 1 AGP slots MicroATX offers. But what is on the market is high 90s percentage of motherboards are 5 or 6 PCI ATX motherboards. And these are for desktops. That's a serious mismatch, IMO. Joe

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (92318)	1/15/2003 6:49:49 PM
From: fyodor_	Respond to of 275872

Jim, re: Extra slots... I agree with Joe that MicroATX would be far preferable (although even MicroATX is quite large - actually sometimes larger than standard ATX in one of the directions). Extra IDE controller...nice to run things like Zip drives off of. Firewire or USB2.0 is much better suited for this kind of thing, plus virtually all motherboards already have two IDE controllers capable of handling 2 devices each. 2 hard drives, a CDR and a DVD drive would be needed to fill them all. SCSI controller SCSI drives really aren't worth it unless you have multiple, simultaneous accesses to the hard drive (which still kills performance, but not as much as for IDE). RAID Now here's a valid one, but still only something very few people choose to do. The place to support something like this is in the existing 2 IDE controllers on the motherboard already&#133 but since so few consumers are interested in taking advantage of RAID, NVIDIA hasn't bothered (yet, anyway). Audiophile sound card. nforce sound is good but suppose someone decides later on they want something better. Yup, that's what 1 of your 2 PCI slots are for. Btw, has anyone done a good comparison review of the nForce audio? I've seen stand-alone reviews, but nothing where it was compared to a variety of solutions. High end video card...onboard gForce won't be cutting edge. That's what your AGP slot is for ;-). I cannot for the life of me understand why ECS has dropped the AGP slot (for a third PCI slot) in their latest MicroATX motherboards. That simply doesn't make sense to me. All this is basically "just in case you need it". So I'd rather have 5 PCI instead of 3. If you insist on getting a standard-sized ATX case, I can understand that. You're not really saving any money on going with MicroATX, so all you would be getting is a space reduction that you're not using anyway. With USB2.0 and FireWire, I don't really see how you'd need more than 2 PCI slots and an AGP slot (and even those 2 PCI slots are in the "just in case" column). For the boards that have traded in the AGP for a third PCI slot&#133 sigh. -fyo