I haven't tried this specific flavor of the via EPIA motherboard, but I have 3 of their predecessors running for various functions. They behave like a pIII (not celeron but pIII) at about 2/3 of the rated speed. The nice feature is they run on low power and some of the units can be run with no fan or minimal fan. I have mine running off some 13 amp 12V regulated lab supplies I bought off eBay for $15. I use one headless as a print/file server for a couple of network printers and a couple of hard drives on my network and it works great for that application. Totally silent except for the hard drive noise and fully configurable. They run Linux and windows XP pro and windows 2K just fine. I use another machine for my kids school work station. It runs a lot of media files and such since we use that machine to do language and math and various media and Internet based class work. The third machine was my wife's computer which she basically uses for web browsing, photo-shop, and word processing. It has recently been replaced with a 3.2G P4. We added some Net Nanny kind of protection to the connection on that machine and the VIA was simply not up to the overhead that program causes. It made web surfing into an excruciating experience. The experience in the P4 is much better and I would expect this to be analagous to how PowerSDR would behave.
The PCI riser is a standard PCI and so far I haven't found any cards that won't function in it. The fire wire works fine as does the USB. The audio in the oldest EPIA machines was kind of poppy, but VIA paid a lot of attention to sound since they perceive a major market for this box in the media room of a home theater They do A/V functions OK such as DVD playback and word processing and web surfing. I doubt they would be a stellar performer for the PowerSDR. 73 W9OY __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
