I found the problem with PCs at work is their size too, but at home, I want features and expandability. I hate the fact that most mainboards don't have enough IRQs and end up doing PCI steering. The sharing of IRQs on mainboaqrds slow them down, and I find at home, most don't have enough. As an example, I have a time critical 24/96 Sampler unit from STA audio running on an Gigabyite mainboard and Athlon 2600. I have had to turn off, game port, midi, on board sound, USB, IDE raid, serial ports so as not to use sharing on the IRQs. Lots of features not enough lines to the PCI. Most companies use the PCI 2.0 spec of sharing because it's cheaper. I'd like to see them produce a board that's got better performance and charge a little more, but now we are talking about servers which is not needed.
I hate having a mainboard where I have to disable features because they have skimped out in design. Riser cards most of the time only add slots, the IRQs however are hard wired into the PCI controller, and so if they are not there, the controller will share what it has. Much like the prommie does. I think it has 1 or maybe 2 IRQs on it sharing with all slots where as Mediator has 5?? someone who knows the hardware will give the correct number here. Yep, makes it more expensive, but also, it's faster. If my gigabyte board had more IRQs I wouldbe able to use more of the features the board was designed with.
AMIGA always had cutting edge stuff. Sure, people had jst bought EGA, but we were using 4096 colours. 4 channell 8 bit sound, DMA and megs of memory. SCSI interface instead of slow PIO IDE modes etc...... It was expensive to buy as not many people used that hardware at that tim, I would expect the same if PCI Express was chosen, so be it, give AMIGA engineers and developers a chance to get in first and develop some great hardware for express. Newtek??
