Sounds like a good idea - I have a couple of EPIA boards I thought about doing the same with. Not sure whether your board would be similar, but the PCI slot on this one is a bit finicky, so I don't know whether it would support all the IRQ/DMA/etc. needed by a sound card.

Also the video output on this one doesn't appear to be true 720x480 in text mode. It looks more like it's upscaled to 800x600 as the pixels are uneven sizes, even on a CRT monitor. I haven't tried 320x200 on it so I don't know how that comes out. I don't know how well it emulates CGA and EGA graphics modes either. It may not given it was designed to run Windows and Linux. Maybe if you can find out what the video chip is it might shed some light on it.

For $20 though it's probably worth trying it out, it may well work perfectly!

The common VIA C3 600MHz processor would be a 'Samuel' core. These have adjustable speed through software, which is nice. The early-to-mid VIA C3 CPUs perform kinda crappy though, in my tests at least. The first really mature VIA C3 processor is the 'Nehemiah' core at 1.0 or 1.2GHz. These are a nice option next to intel, yet even for a 1.2GHz Nehemiah you gotta consider that it compares to a something like a Pentium III 700MHz.

For an MS-DOS system: if you want games to work well go with an ISA sound card. If you want mess around with PCI Sound Blaster emulation, consider that it may not work well with the motherboard chipset. In case PCI Sound Blaster emulation initializes, there will still be DOS games that won't work with it. Your milage may vary, like before.

gerwin wrote:

The common VIA C3 600MHz processor would be a 'Samuel' core. These have adjustable speed through software, which is nice. The early-to-mid VIA C3 CPUs perform kinda crappy though, in my tests at least. The first really mature VIA C3 processor is the 'Nehemiah' core at 1.0 or 1.2GHz. These are a nice option next to intel, yet even for a 1.2GHz Nehemiah you gotta consider that it compares to a something like a Pentium III 700MHz.

For an MS-DOS system: if you want games to work well go with an ISA sound card. If you want mess around with PCI Sound Blaster emulation, consider that it may not work well with the motherboard chipset. In case PCI Sound Blaster emulation initializes, there will still be DOS games that won't work with it. Your milage may vary, like before.

I've been happy with my luck using the Vortex 8830, and it's not like ITX existed when ISA was still relevant, plus for MS-DOS 6.22 a 600mhz Samuel seems like it should be fine, I can't imagine IPC being so bad it can't at least to do pentium MMX performance.