Of course, but I think that the problem is more in the kernel than in the hardware.I can confirm this - running a Dell Dimension 4550 with a Pentium 4 2.53GHz. Running Red Hat 7.3 with a custom kernel was fine (heck, even better than fine, that thing was _fast_ - using the Red Hat kernel on 7.3 was out of question, since it didn't know the chipset, so it wouldn't activate DMA for the harddrives).
I found a solution to this problem: Run a fresh compiled kernel with Interactivity patches.
The results are outstanding.... Fast, responsive even with high IOs.
With RH9 kernel, when MsDev (under win2k in vmware) was in link phase, making a lot of IOs, Mozilla (under native Linux) took between 3-10 seconds just to refresh a page...
After switching over to Shrike, any kind of disc activity will slow things down considerably, to the point where I don't even bother trying to use Mozilla while compiling something or while extracting large (>10 GB) tar files. The mouse cursor stops while moving the mouse, typing commands in an xterm is about 3-5 seconds delayed (meaning, I type, and 3-5 seconds later I see what I typed on the screen - makes me feel like back in the days of "cooperative multitasking"). It is _not_ connected to running vmware. Maybe some of the patches Red Hat applies don't like the chipset on that board, or something like that.
Martin
