Latency patch for via kt133a.. good, bad.. or ugly?

[Zarick]

I was hoping somebody could tell me wether the latency patch for the kt133a motherboards was really any good or whether it causes issue. Also what exactly does it fix.

 

[BFG10K]

Basically it improves the slow PCI/IDE performance that certain KT133a motherboards suffer from and it can help if your sound card is crackling or popping. Back when I had my KT133a I installed it but I didn't really notice any difference.

 

[AnAndAustin]

😉 Yeah for technical reasons anyone using a VIA mobo (maybe excluding the KT400) should use it as they all have a nasty under-riding problem which significantly impacts the speed of the PCI bus. Without getting technical installing the 'VIA PCI Latency Patch' simply overcomes a lot of the shortfall by reducing waiting times and how long each PCI device can hold/hog the whole bus. I would unquestionably rec using it.

 

[silent tone]

Maybe I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't notice any improvement using the latency patch on an asus A7V. I installed it because of a buffer issue with my hauppauge 401 capture card not getting the data across the bus consistently(it results in streaks from previous frames being captured instead of full correct frames each time). I had no side-effects though, so it couldn't hurt.

 

[The Sauce]

No, you won't see any performance improvement. It specifically was made to address some issues with conflicts on the PCI bus...if you don't have them then you won't see any difference. It came out around the time of the whole Soundblaster Live! and VIA chipset incompatability ruckus but in my experience never really fixed that issue. I have installed it on every system I have had since then just for the heck of it and have had no problems.

 

[Bovinicus]

Actually it does improve harddisk performance quite substantially. I have seen benchmarks of before and after the installation of the patch. However, harddisk usage in general is pretty low, and therefore in everyday tasks (Gaming, office apps, etc.) do not really benefit too much. However, I bet defragmentation would run significantly faster with the same amount of fragmentation. Also, bootup times might be increased. Performance could also be boosted reasonably if one has a low amount of memory, and therefore a high amount of pagefile use.

 

[AnAndAustin]

😉 Other times it could prove useful and which incidently may not be overly evident to the user would be when the PCI bus is very busy or populated heavily with a modem, NICs, RAID/IDE controller, souncard, USB card, TVcard and esp if you use a PCI gfx solution. As an end user you don't really know if one PCI device is totally hogging the whole PCI bus, or that latency/waiting times are large but then perf can vary by about 10% without it being evident either. So all in all I'd still strongly rec using the patch.