Is it true many soundcards have problems with VIA chipset, etc..?!

[Dance123]

Hi,

What exactly is VIA? Is it true many soundcards have problems with VIA chipset?! I intend to get an M-Audio card. Anyway, if I buy an Asus P4C800 or other Asus motherboard, will this be without VIA? I believe the chipset is Intel, does that mean it has nothing to do with VIA, cause sometimes in specs I see things like VIA controllers etc.. could these give problems with soundcards etc.. Apart from mobo, any other components I should avoid regarding soundcards problems, etc..

Thanks in advance for the info!

 

[Vette73]

you do know the m-audio uses a VIA sound chip called Envy right

And in the early sb live days the 686 southbridge did not like those cards, but not now.

 

[Peter]

There has been a PCI compliance problem in Creative's early SoundBlaster Live! chips, causing system hangs with VIA and SiS chipsets. Other sound card chips weren't affected, and later revisions of the Live! chips (from 5.1 on) had the problem corrected.

For the M-Audio whose chip comes from VIA anyway, this isn't an issue at all.

 

[Insane3D]

The SB Live issue was primarily with boards that used the Via 686B Southbridge and would result in data corruption. This was actually more a result of a faulty ACPI header in the Creative drivers than the chipset itself IIRC.

 

[Peter]

Not really. It was a glitch on a PCI signalling line (bus master request, grant, can't remember). Some chipsets saw it as a valid assertion, some didn't. Intel chipsets of the time didn't notice, SiS chipsets hang straight, no cure, while on VIA chipsets, workarounds were attempted by tweaking the PCI arbiter registers (in the NORTH bridge, not the 686B!). It was early versions of these workaround attempts that lead to data loss in other high troughput agents' transmissions - 686B IDE, add-on SCSI cards, whatever. The final VIA approved workaround for the SB!Live chip still costs quite a bit of PCI performance, but still allows other agents to work well.

The issue wasn't helped by Creative's attitude of "we test on Intel chipsets, and don't care about the rest" they displayed back then. Nonetheless, the SB!Live 5.1 fixed it.

Mainboard BIOSes that contain some kind of workaround against the SB!Live issue but not the final one are evil though. Check with your board vendor. You can still see the history of that mess e.g. at the ECS K7VZA v3.x BIOS history ...

 

[Rabmash]

Ive played with many a system with a 686a/b southbridge.

No matter what soundcard it was, if I put it into the slot that shares the IRQ with the AGP slot I never had any bother.

Tested:

Audigy
SB Live
SB Live 5.1
Cmedia 8738 cards

Abit KT7 Raid
Abit KT7a Raid
Asus A7v

 

[Peter]

It's been an electrical problem, highly responsive to voodoo measures like putting the card into a certain slot, or even putting a certain other PCI card into the slot next to it. And it affected the original SB!Live only, the 5.1 is fine. (So is the C-Media 8x38 chip series, no PCI compliance problem there at all.)