686B Southbridge not supported by Win2K?

[senior guy]

From what I read in Anand's KT133A article, the 686B Southbridge (used on KT133A boards) is not properly supported by Win2K. In that article, Anand reported the performance of the (KT133A's) IDE subsystem was slower than a KT133 with the 686A Southbridge!

Now that the A7V133 is available I want to get one, but since I run Win2K (with disk I/O intensive apps) I need to find out what's happening with this problem... Anyone know?

 

[Insane3D]

I believe the latest Via service pack..4.28..has the updated Win2K busmaster drivers...

You can get it here..



Via 4 in 1 Version 4.28

 

[Nikepete]

Win2K does not support ATA100 natively until Service Pack 2 not yet released. Only ATA66. Third party add-on cards or Raid like Promise, Highpoint do support ATA100 with Win2K.

 

[senior guy]

I wouldn't think that Win2K's non-support of ATA100 should make a noticeable difference since disk i/o is pretty much limited by the burst transfer rate of the ide drive(s).

 

[Nikepete]

There are several issues with the 686B, ATA100 drives and Win2K: some WD and 75GXP IBM are set by Win2K as PIO mode non-DMA (!). Definitely the Via Busmaster drivers need some mome fixes. MS has the Win2K hotfix for ATA100 but you have to pay for it. With the problems from both MS and Via, the benchmarks are totally meaningless under Win2K.