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I'm a big fan of the SOYO Kiky X-Series USB adapter. It works in Linux, Windows and MacOS X, and has allowed me to use the PSX pads I like with my games.

"Instant-on" PCs aren't new. Take a look at the Soyo SY-P4VAL version M (I think this was on Slashdot before but I don't have a link). The built-in BIOS "media center" software lets you play MP3 CDs, audio CDs, VCDs, DVDs, and watch TV. It's only ~$130, as opposed to $2500 - $2600.
Granted, this article is about a laptop with instant-on capabilities, which is of course cooler and more expensive.

Also look at the page on performance and you will see them compare it to the MSI KM2M Combo-L. If you do a google search on those terms, the first link is their review of that board, which can take a "1GHz to 2600+ processor." On the performance page they benchmark the Soyo P4VAL (Projected price, $69 without tuner) with "Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533MHz" ($124) against the MSI KM2M ($54) with an unspecified CPU, but it does not have 333FSB support so it can't be more than an Athlon XP 2600+ 266MHz FSB ($77 - Actually the 333FSB model is $2 cheaper.) Hence, $193 for the soyo vs $131 for the MSI plus its most powerful CPU. The MSI does almost as well on the CPU benchmark (4391 vs 5810 PCMarks) and does much worse than the Soyo on memory (2400 vs 4844) and their conclusion for this page is "The Soyo P4VAL will have an MSRP of around $69 (without TV tuner, remote, etc, just the board), which is only about $13 more than the KM2M motherboard. It will obviously offer you much more in terms of features and performance and therefore, it's simply a better buy." So let me get this straight, a full size motherboard which, with the tested CPU will run you $63 more, being used for a purpose which does not require massive memory bandwidth, is a better buy? Yes it offers the goofy BIOS menu but that thing doesn't even seem to have SVCD support.

That's right, they don't bother to tell us if it supports nonstandard-bitrate VCD (known as XVCD) and if it doesn't support XVCD, SVCD, and XSVCD, I consider that to be an amazingly crippled featureset for a multimedia PC, one which will mandate the use of a real live hard-drive-installed (or net-booted, I guess) operating system. Neither their etbios page nor soyo's page for the board bother to tell you what types of media are played, but the review says "You have access to multi-media functions such as AUDIO/MP3 CD playback, VCD playback, DVD playback and TV Tuner support" which implies that that's all the functions. No MPEG4, for example, and no SVCD. This bios will only read media on CDs as far as I can tell from the review, so you can't play media off a hard drive, USB, memory stick, etc etc. In other words, it will do the things a $80 DVD player from Wal-Mart will do for you, but its output probably won't be as good (I don't see any component output on this baby, but my $80 Pana DVD-S35S is progressive scan, supports VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, DVD, MP3, WMA, and JPEG.)

In fact, the reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get the TV feature to autoscan to select only good channels (a feature which might not even be present, for all anyone including soyo will tell us) but was impressed that there was an escape function to go back to the menu. Woop-de-doo!

All in all, this article is unprofessional crap, and the etbios is basically useless. The fact that it has funky bios means that it's likely to be a pain in the ass sometime down the road. This looks like a product looking for a purpose. Were it done right, with access to filesystems not on optical media, and support for additional codecs in some format, it would be interesting, but this product is as goofy as the review.

You mean like the Asus A78VX, Abit AT7-MAX2, Aopen AX4BMAX, Gigabyte GA-8IEXP, Soyo SY-P4I Fire Dragon, or Asus P4B533-E?

These are all new motherboards, and most of them are on the high end of pricing.

Firewire is more expensive to implement, period. And the number of devices that can substantially benefit from the faster speed of Firewire are very few (basically digital video... high end digital audio as well, but that's so stratospheric as to be irrelevant in the consumer market).

http://www.soyousa.com/commerce/proddesc.php?id=11 6

or more details at:

http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=11 6

http://www.soyousa.com/commerce/proddesc.php?id=11 6

or more details at:

http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=11 6

As far as I'm concerned, the AMD Athalon XP is the Pentium 4's bitch. Intel is soo far ahead of AMD its insane. I have a few computers, and one of them runs on an athalon. That thing is the biggest piece of shat I have ever built/owned. For some reason, multi-tasking is a really big problem for this thing. NEVER buy an AMD, Intel is the only way to go.

For a good motherboard come here: Soyo USA

Awhile back AOpen came out with a motherboard that was black and the chipset heatsink was gold-plated. Very sharp.

While many of the motherboards out there are sticking with classic green, there are some that are still using black. AOpen has a line of motherboards that are black with silver, and my favorite Soyotek has a cool black board with purple PCI controllers and yellow RAID connectors. The Dragon can be found here.

With the right motherboards, the Duron will be a real winner. Maybe stick a HighPoint chip on there, to circumvent Via's and AMD's disk transfer rates which are in the crapper...and give us some overclocking options...and you've got a great opportunity for overclocking heaven if you stick an Alpha on it!

Hopefully Soyo will make a decent Duron board - the 6BA+ IV, their flagship BX model, which my 500E is on, is the best board I've ever used. It's incredibly stable even running 1.5 times faster than normal (image here), and if they make a Duron board I can't wait to see how far people take these things.