--- John Niven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Have you looked at the way the PC motherboard market > is going? Most > have onboard ethernet, sound, and RAID interfaces. > Many have basic > video, and I think more of that is coming. I built > PC's for my gaming > sons that only have one expansion card slot used - > for the fancy video > card. More is being integrated on one motherboard so > I think less expansion slots are needed.
I chose the board in my current PC because it did NOT have onboard sound, network and other things. It has the serial and parallel ports, four USB 1.1, floppy, dual channel ATA66 and an integrated dual channel ATA100 RAID controller that only supports hard drives. Why this board (ABIT KG7RAID)? Because it had enough PCI slots (and no silly AMR or CNR slot!) so I could install the network card, sound card, USB 2.0 card, firewire card and SCSI card of MY choosing. It currently has five IDE hard drives, an IDE CD-RW, an IDE DVD-+RW and SCSI 640meg MO and SCSI Zip 100 plus a 1.44M floppy drive. Yup, I'm exactly the type of user Apple has _ignored_ since the first Beige G3 started coming off the production line. We're the Power User, the "Burger King, Have it Your Way" user. We want to choose our own bits and pieces. We love to upgrade this or that without having to shell out a big chunk of change for a whole new motherboard, which can be a gamble on some bit of built in hardware not being as good as what was on the board being replaced. Another problem of the everything on board, limited expansion motherboards is if one built in peripheral gets toasted, then you're stuck with either replacing the whole board or able to only substitute one expansion card for the dead part if the board is otherwise still functional. I got stuck that way once and at the time I was short on $$$ so I had to put up with the thing for a long while until I could buy my current board. If I'd bought a nothing-on-board board with lots of slots I could've simply swapped out the defekt card and had it back to good as new or better. Another cheap PC marketing tactic I hope Apple doesn't fall into with the new generation is a low priced model with a hot CPU that's woefully inadequate in one or two critical areas. The big PC OEMs love to sell cheap boxen running XP Home with only 256megs, or worse, 128megs, onboard video using a chunk of that small amount of RAM, and/or a hard drive with an impressive number of Gigabytes but spinning at only 5,400 RPM. But hey! It has a 2.9Ghz Celeron! (And no AGP or PCI-X slot to upgrade the crappy onboard video, and only 2 or 3 PCI slots, one of which has a 56K software driven modem in.) Please Apple! Please never build such a box! (Well, for the bargain user, you can build a 2 or 3 slotter with everything built in, like the Beige G3, but it should at least have an AGP or PCI-X slot to extend its useful life!) It will be total Fandemonium! August (Fri) 5th, (Sat) 6th & (Sun) 7th, 2005 http://www.fandemonium.org __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Vintage Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Vintage Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:vintage.macs@mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/vintage.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
