Old computer rocks

Since my home workhorse desktop computer motherboard (FIC AU13) died after serving me well through the last 5 years, I scavenged my IT trashcan and came up with an even older setup:

CPU: Ahthlon XP 1800+ (133MHz x 11.5)
Motherboard: ECS K7S5A 1.0
Memery: Samsung 512MB DDR266 x2
Graphic: ATI Radeon 7000
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Live! Digital + Creative Sound Blaster PCI (1373)
Network Card: 3Com 905T
TV Tuner Card: Leadtek TV 2000 Expert
USB Card: Via 4

So you can see my motherboard expansion slots are full. And everything works very well now. Here are the catches and the reasons I used add-on cards instead of using on-board ones.

Sound Card

My K7S5A's on-board sound card is SiS7012. There is no sound driver provided on ECS's Web site under K7S5A. I downloaded the driver under other motherboards from ECS Web site. It works, but the CPU load is so high that video playback suffers. Creative Sound Blaster Live! Digital has good audio processing unit, off load the job from CPU. I added a second sound card for Skype only with a headset plugged in all the time. SiS7012 could work for Skype if its output is not so weak, causing the voice in headphone very low.

Network Card

For some reason, the MAC address of my on-board SiS900 NIC of K7S5A is 000000000 (yes, all zeros). And I want to off-load as much as possible work from CPU, an old 3COM 905T does a great job.

USB Card

K7S5A only has 2 USB 1.1 ports. No USB 2.0 support.

Graphic Card

ATI Radeon 7000 is indeed very old. Since I am not a 3D gaming fan, it is fine for most of jobs, except high definition video. I found out the DVD decoding part of Radeon 7000 is not full-blown as Radeon 9500 and higher. It still need quite some CPU to render. For VMR7 rendering, it has limited hardware support. For VMR9 rendering, no hardware support at all. The result is VMR7 (DirectX7) look OK although CPU load is high, but for VMR9 (DirectX9), stair-shaped refreshing is noticeable and CPU load is full.