Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
@marrandy
IDE may be old tech but it isn't yet obsolete and leaving it out would annoy people as much as when Intel tried to leave AGP out of their PCI-Express motherboard plans. Like AGP, IDE is used for many of todays drives and so most of the market uses them SATA drivers a rare and more expensive in most cases, also peopl will want to be able to keep costs down be reusing some of their existing kit. The reason for Intel keeping AGP is for low to mid end markets where you can't afford a high cost graphics card but want a decent motherboard+processor combo, also so that older cards from your "obsolete" machine would work. For example I would be p*ssed off if I coulnd't use my Radeon 9800 Pro AIW in a new mobo jsut cos it had PCI-Express. Also the IBM CPC925 Chipset doesn't support PCI-Express, neither does the only alternative available in the forseable future, Marvell's Discovery III (the PPC 970 variant)
Most of the major compter manufacturers will have new machines by March 2005 that only have the items listed in 2).
Note that nForce4(CK8-04) prototype (Q4 2004/Q1 2005) and ASUS/Gigabyte/MSI Intel 915/925 based motherboards still includes PS/2 ports, 1x Parallel and 1x COM. Unreleased nForce 4 prototypes still includes P-ATA. Legacy ports can be replicated via USB btw?
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digitaldisaster 
