kx-133's ide controller bug

[EmperorNero]

in the july issuse of maximum pc, max pc was reviewing a computer from alienware - athlon gig, 256 pc-133 ram, k7v, maxtor daimondmax 40 gig. the k7v supports ata/66, but in the system, it has a promise ata/66 controller - alienware says it's b/c kx-133 ide controllers are buggy. to verify this, max pc benchmarked the hd, the hard drive registered speeds of 11MB/sec attached to the mobo; and attached to the controller card, it jumped to 24MB/sec - they then tested on the amd 750 and i820 chipsets, also 24MB/sec. can anyone elaborate on this bug? and does via have an upgraded driver or bios revision that fixes this?

 

[Peter]

Some BIOSes seem to produce performance issues with VIA's UDMA66 IDE controllers - Epox recently did a roundhammer update to all their boards in question, be they super-7, slot-1, socket-370, slot-A, et voila, after updating BIOS, performance is up to par with all the other chip makers' UDMA66 controllers. Maybe the K7V still suffers from whatever that was.

(With VIA chipsets, the IDE controller is in the south bridge, and all CPU platforms currently share the same choice of 596B standard south or 686A super south.)

Regards, Peter