Have fun with you're new motherboard, I have a Dragon + and love it. Another good website that I have found useful is www.amdmb.com, they have great forums. Enjoy!
Brett,
Here's the best I can do to give you an idea of performance:
System:
1.4 G Athlon-C
ECS K7S5A motherboard
256 MB Crucial PC2100 ram
Using 368 MB of shn files for the test:
Maxtor 20 Gig 7200 rpm IDE ATA66- 2 minute, 35 seconds to decompress.
2x Maxtor 40 Gig 7200 rpm IDE ATA100 in...
Just wanted to second the comment about software raid 0 in windows. It works great! I also uncompress large .shn files and the increase in speed when using software raid is significant.
Nelson,
If you are somewhat handy with a soldering iron you could make one without much difficulty. I made my own db-25 to rca six-channel cable. I found a diagram of which pins correspond to which channels, and used a db-25 connector from radio shack and some spare cables. Works great.