Originally posted by: geforcetony
Well, speaking out of personal experience (with the Neo2, I mean), I would say go for the Neo2. Why over the A8V, you ask? One word: VIA. While I will admit that VIA
has gotten alot better in the past few years, they are still by no means great. I have owned several VIA based mobos over the years (simply because until now, I haven't had the option, and VIA was the cheapest way to go, unfortunately). From a Slot 1-based VIA mobo (for Pentium II\III CPU's), to a Socket 370 VIA board, and even a Pentium 4 board (in the form of the P4X400). Each of the boards were progressively better than the last as far as stability was concerned, but were still finicky sometimes. The best mobo, by a close margin, was an Intel 440BX (IMHO, the chipset of ALL chipsets) board that I bought to replace the dead VIA-based Slot 1 board that "I killed" by flashing the BIOS (yes, it was for that board, I'm not that stupid
). I figured I'd give VIA one last try with the P4X400 board, which, ironically, was a VIA branded board. It was OK, but it was slow. DDR400 performed like just above DDR266 in speeds, and I was using good Corsair memory, and it was buggy as hell. I clawed and scratched for every new chipset driver, and downloaded them the day they came out, but it was essentially useless, as it was still buggy and underperforming.
Though all you Athlon fanbois out there do owe a debt of gratitude to VIA, as the Athlon wouldn't be what it is today without VIA's " good ol' " KT-Series chipsets. Hell, I'd even go so far as to saying that AMD may not even be around without VIA's help with the Athlon. But, times have changed, fortunately.
I can't say the same about my nForce3-based Neo2. This thing matches my old 440BX in everything, and is only second to it because, well, the 440BX was first
. In all seriousness, this thing is rock solid. The only crashes I've had are my own damn fault, and nothing more. It overclocks like a b!tch, and I'm on my way to getting 2.6GHz out of my good ol' Winnie. I am very impressed with this board, and it will definitely be sad for me to see it go when it does, and even then, I'll probably just demote it to a backup box, instead of tossing it, or giving it to my Grandma
. So, below, I have my personal "ranks" for chipset manufacturers:
--AMD--
1.) NVIDIA
2.) ATI
3.) AMD (some of their chipsets have been great)
4.) VIA
5.) SiS
6.) ALi
--Intel--
1.) Intel
2.) NVIDIA (when they come out with their nForce4 "Intel Edition")
3.) ATI
4.) VIA
5.) SiS
6.) ALi
So, there you have it. My list in order of my opinion of the best chipset manufacturers out there. Some may not agree, but again, this is MY opinion.
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