On Wed, 3 Apr 2002 14:01:13 -0800, Gavin Scott wrote:

>Paul writes:
>> I am specifically concerned with non-standard power supplies such
>> as those which supply 3.3, 5 and 12 volts (3.3 is non-standard)[...]
>
>3.3V is a fairly typical chip supply voltage now.  The days when all the
>logic in a PC ran at +5V are long gone, and the day when nothing runs at
>that voltage are probably not far away.  A Pentium IV CPU chip runs at 1.7
>volts today, and much of the high speed support logic is probably similar,
>so I would not be surprised to see power supplies evolving further into the
>low voltage range as things progress.  CPUs will probably be running on less
>than one volt of power before long.
>

Got no problems with 3.3 volts AS A STANDARD. Let's just write one. In the case of Dell there is a special plug in to the motherboard to use
that 3.3 volts. Now integrating the mobo and the power supply locks into using only Dell power supplies. "Uh, HOW LONG did you say that
was backordered?" Besides, most of the modern mobo's are jumperless and are happy to supply whatever voltage the CPU and memory
need right off the mobo.

>The "Win Modem" type
>devices are only supported in Windows because the card is actually missing
>much of the hardware it needs to operate, which is instead supplied by a
>software implementation running in a driver under Windows.

We see a lot of those, they use the CPU on the mobo to do all the processing and suck up a lot of the available CPU. They are a pain to get
to work. Personally I prefer external modems because they don't require you to reboot the computer to reset the modem. (We HP3000 types
are REAL familiar with THIS problem).

>Another common scheme is to have embedded video hardware that shares the
>system RAM rather than having its own video ram.  This eats up 2-16MB of the
>memory in your system and is also less likely to be supported in non-Windows
>operating systems.

Yep, no problem with this. They always put a switch in the BIOS to allow you to use a PCI or AGP video card of your own choosing. I've seen
a lot of these mobo's, but the best adhere to the ATX standard and can fit in any case. I've seen boards crammed with a NIC card, a sound
card, a video card and a SCSI card, all on the motherboard. All standard ATX form factor, all fit in a standard case.

Paul

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