Abit are kindly releasing, just for all you guys, another KT333 board which is much more conventional (and looks to me to be based on the KR7A design). The new board is called the KX7-333.
Cool, sounds good. Losing every legacy port seemed a rather big jump to me, some of us still NEEEEEEEED parallel and/or serial.
Yeah, I think legacy ports will be with us for a little time yet, as zquack says, losing them all in one swoop seems kinda drastic! Still, if that what a person has been waiting for, and they have absolutely no use for any 'old' hardware! The new abit KX7-333 sounds pretty good though, even if it will be a while before I move away from my trusty old Dragon+!
I personally like the AT7, and since I do not use the serial, parallel or PS/2 ports on my KT7A, I'm planning to go for it after my holiday.
u have usb everything huh?? The only usb i use is printer and that's only cause i needed the p// port for my LCD my kvm would be useless without legacy
The target audience for the board are users that want a legacy free system. I just wish it happened a long time ago.
Not USB EVERYTHING.....just most. USB keyboard, mouse, card reader, webcam, scanner. 100Mbps network printer...
I think I've read USB uses more CPU cycles too. I think that was one of the main reasons I was more interested in Firewire stuff.
That's what I _THINK_ I read, yes. I could be way wrong. That just seems to be one of the reasons Firewire was more appealing to me. Kind of like SCSI/IDE. Firewire is more expensive because it uses more hardware. Hopefully someone who knows for sure will confirm. Think I'll go do a search on it.
The use of CPU power is very mininimal in any case. The difference between USB and PS/2 in this respect is to do with the way interrupts are handled (PS/2 requires a unique IRQ for each device, USB uses a single IRQ for all devices on it). Suffice to say that with any modern system, there is no noticeable difference in performance between USB and PS/2 mouse and keyboard (certainly I did not notice a performance drop when switching over).
i heard with people using somethin like the extigy soundcard were getting a 40% constant cpu usage by the usb port because of it...
Most likely depends on the device. Mouse and Keyboard impact are minimal as Issac mentioned. USB drives probably use the CPU more as well (just a guess).
The extigy is a little different, since it is trying to use a 12Mbit bus in place of a 133MB/s one. Its performance is indeed lower than equivalent PCI cards, but I don't think it is really designed for desktop use. Thus there is some considerable processing which can't be done by the extigy, so the CPU has to take that load. That is not the case with most USB peripherals (scanners and webcams excepted). Scanners and webcams will take some CPU load whatever interface they are on, and USB, USB 2 and Firewire are the best interfaces for these items.
