Thoughts on system to buy in 1 week

[gunf1ghter]

yes.

Originally posted by: busmaster11

Originally posted by: gunf1ghter
If I was getting an AMD chipset I would be getting an nforce.

*sigh*

I have a headache now...


*rereads sentence*

OH!!! You mean a chipset for an AMD cpu!

 

[human2k]

My biggest issue - PLEASE save yourself the trouble of getting the VIA KT333 - I know its only from personal experience but VIA chips are so buggy - I've had every chip from the KX133a slotA to the 266A - and the boards were all Asus, Abit and Microstar, and they are all unstable. I've since gone to the SIS735 and the nForce 415 - and they work beautifully...

hahahahahahhahaahh.....rofl, is this guy from 1997? I own nothing but via boards, KT133A, KT266A, and KT333. From my expierence THEY ARE ROCK STABLE. I would agree however that prior chipsets have had there instabilities, but now a days via chipsets have matured into high perfomance chipsets. BTW I have a sound blaster live 5.1 and it works perfectly on my KT266a board.

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: human2k

My biggest issue - PLEASE save yourself the trouble of getting the VIA KT333 - I know its only from personal experience but VIA chips are so buggy - I've had every chip from the KX133a slotA to the 266A - and the boards were all Asus, Abit and Microstar, and they are all unstable. I've since gone to the SIS735 and the nForce 415 - and they work beautifully...

hahahahahahhahaahh.....rofl, is this guy from 1997? I own nothing but via boards, KT133A, KT266A, and KT333. From my expierence THEY ARE ROCK STABLE. I would agree however that prior chipsets have had there instabilities, but now a days via chipsets have matured into high perfomance chipsets. BTW I have a sound blaster live 5.1 and it works perfectly on my KT266a board.

Yet another troll defending his sytem... Why don't you scroll back up and answer my questions then?

Look, I'm sure the majority of VIA based setups are stable for most people. But like I said this is personal experience. Of recent chipsets I've owned BX, TX, Alladin 5+, SIS 735, VIA KA133/a/KT133, KT266A, Serverworks 3 LE, and NForce 415. For me, clearly and consistently the ones that stick out like a sore thumb in terms of stability are the three VIA boards I've owned.

 

[busmaster11]

Anyone wanna vote on this?

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=797651

 

[XMan]

Originally posted by: human2k

My biggest issue - PLEASE save yourself the trouble of getting the VIA KT333 - I know its only from personal experience but VIA chips are so buggy - I've had every chip from the KX133a slotA to the 266A - and the boards were all Asus, Abit and Microstar, and they are all unstable. I've since gone to the SIS735 and the nForce 415 - and they work beautifully...

hahahahahahhahaahh.....rofl, is this guy from 1997? I own nothing but via boards, KT133A, KT266A, and KT333. From my expierence THEY ARE ROCK STABLE. I would agree however that prior chipsets have had there instabilities, but now a days via chipsets have matured into high perfomance chipsets. BTW I have a sound blaster live 5.1 and it works perfectly on my KT266a board.

My 266A board sucks. Let's see . . . the voltage adjustments in the BIOS don't work, and it runs the CPU at 1.7 instead of 1.75. Try to kick it up, doesn't work. If I put more than one stick of memory in it, it will crash in Windows 2000. It just doesn't FEEL steady. I went from an AMD 751 chipset to this, and believe me, there is a big difference. No more VIA for me.

 

[MistaTastyCakes]

My 266A board sucks. Let's see . . . the voltage adjustments in the BIOS don't work, and it runs the CPU at 1.7 instead of 1.75. Try to kick it up, doesn't work. If I put more than one stick of memory in it, it will crash in Windows 2000. It just doesn't FEEL steady. I went from an AMD 751 chipset to this, and believe me, there is a big difference. No more VIA for me.

Sounds more like a manufacturer problem than a Via one, but it seems blindly bashing Via is the trend around here..

Via chipset based motherboards are among the top selling AMD chipsets. Do you think that's just pure coincidence? People buy parts for speed and stability. if Via was SOOOO horrible like half the people in this forum claim them to be, Via would probably be out of business. It's the same thing as that guy who came around a couple weeks ago talking about his EE brother said AMD is unstable. If a product sucks, people won't buy it. If a product is good, people will. As for all the people whining about latency, who cares? Even with the horrible

"latency bugs" or whatever, Via is STILL the fastest or one of the fastest out there for AMD processors. I'm by no means a zealot.. I could care less who makes the thing as long as it works well. All I'm saying is if Via is half as bad as people complain about, how do they always gain overwhelming support from mobo manufacturers and more importantly, customers?

Oh well. I'll admit, Via has come out with some clunkers, like the original KT266 chipset for instance. But they fixed the glaring problems of that, and have improved in the 266A and 333 chipsets. By no means is any chipset perfect, but judging a company on manufacturer error, a bug that apparantly can't kill real world performance too much since Via is still one of the top performers, or user error, is just kinda silly. Ok rant done I just figure that people so quickly jump on the anti-whatever-company bandwagon and don't realize that they must be doing SOMETHING right, figuring they're not out of business.

Just my 2 cents. Flame away...

 

[mcveigh]

get an alpha pal 8045 as the heatsink, much quieter, and more secure.

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

so...i looked at the poll, and via is pretty much even with amd, intel, etc. Go for via, or go for something else...?

 

[busmaster11]

Sounds more like a manufacturer problem than a Via one, but it seems blindly bashing Via is the trend around here..

Blindly huh? Prove it. Show me the things I ask for and prove to me VIA knows what they're doing. The last guy I asked never came back.

Via chipset based motherboards are among the top selling AMD chipsets. Do you think that's just pure coincidence?

Nope. The average non-tech savvy user won't notice any of the gripes I or most people here have mentioned against VIA. They're cheap, well integrated, and are always among the first chipsets to come out. They have a great partnership with AMD.

People buy parts for speed and stability. if Via was SOOOO horrible like half the people in this forum claim them to be, Via would probably be out of business. It's the same thing as that guy who came around a couple weeks ago talking about his EE brother said AMD is unstable.

The KT266A was the only game in town for high performance AMD DDR chipsets months ago. The AMD 760 wasn't overwhelming, and it wasn't produced in quantity. Most people also were not willing to take chances on SIS and ALI. If nForce came out fast and cheap as it is now, you would not see everyone with a KT266A as you do now. nVidia missed the boat on that one because of timing.

As for all the people whining about latency, who cares? Even with the horrible

"latency bugs" or whatever, Via is STILL the fastest or one of the fastest out there for AMD processors.

If you're on this forum, you ought to be savvy enough to care. VIA did not make a KT266A high performance chip thats significantly better than their previous attempt, their previous attempt ought to have been that fast to begin with!

In other words, you look at the KT266A as a triumph, while I compare it to being roughly equivalent to nForce in terms of speed, and see that in actuality it was just par, and the KT266 was a failure!

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: TazmanianBubblegum
so...i looked at the poll, and via is pretty much even with amd, intel, etc. Go for via, or go for something else...?

Of the two competing chipsets, the VIA KT266A could first be found in a mature board around last October or so... (Someone correct me if I'm wrong) This is around the time when the slower XP chips first got cheap enough for most people to upgrade to.

The nForce 415 chip first appeared in a mature motherboard around Febuary of this year. This was the window of opportunity nForce missed. This is why you see many more people with VIA chips in their machines.

To be fair the nForce 420, which performed similiarly (slightly slower) to the 415, came out about September with integrated Geforce2MX graphics integrated into an IGP. The 415 doesn't have an IGP.

The 420 was buggy and not very popular because hardware geeks wanted to stay away from integrated graphics. They didn't want to pay for something they won't use, takes up bandwidth, and costs more. Therefore the initial impression of the nForce was slightly negative.

If you're still unsure, look at benchmarks (the nforce has a negligible advantage overall) and other forums and draw your own conclusions.

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

Cool, I'll check it out, thanks for all your help and honesty. Greatly appreciate it, as I was uninformed on this issue stated.

Thanks again.

 

[Yobbo]

I don't think I will ever be getting a VIA chip again...I've had so many problems and I know its the fault of the VIA:

Warcraft3 beta (I was one of the lucky people to get a legit version) wouldn't run under Win2k/VIA and crashed often under WinXP/VIA...Blizzard admitted it and said that they would work around it, but it would take a while *sigh*

Anyway, I have a Creative video card and a VIA chipset, I can hardly play any games with it, I can't wait to get my newer video card (another post hehehe) and my newer computer altogether (I will prob. go with intel, I want something stable for a change).

Anyway, I have not had too many good experiences with VIA and would not really recommend them to anyone unless they finally make something that doesn't crash my computer randomly (I've swapped everything in and out, and it still randomly freezes on most VIA chipset mobos)

 

[pennylane]

yobbo, the VIA chipset has stability problems with a creative video cards? i'm considering getting a VIA chipset (ECS K7VTA3.1) as part of an upgrade, and i currently have a Creative GeForce 2 GTS. i'm now worried about stability problems

 

[pennylane]

bump

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

eh, money situation did not work out as planned, gonna have to go the AMD route.

 

[MisterDuck]

Eh....I'm not interested in the via bashing. I'm very happy with the stability of my Soltek (kt266a) and my brother's computer uses a kt133a - and it's a very stable machine. My dad just built a system with the kt333 and it's rock solid, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. I do know I've used FAR, FAR worse chipsets than any of the aforementioned.

In reply to the ORIGINAL post, that system looks fine, although I personally DO NOT like the asus MB. I think it's overpriced and has features that aren't really all that useful, and it comes with the typical assortment of worthless software. I just built a box with that Asus MB (the raid version) and I like my soltek much better - the bios is far more comprehensive and useful, it doesn't come with cheap stupid add on cards, and it was a much easier install. The asus had pathetic OC'ing features and the voltage setting were a total joke, which seemed strange to me since traditionally people consider ASUS to be an OC'ers board.

Toss in that you're paying an extra thirty bucks, and my soltek is an easy sell. =)

Other than that, the system looks great. I wouldn't bother with raid, and if you do make sure you do the one that gives you redundancy (I can never remember if it's 0 or 1), not speed - too many fools out there trying to get a bit of extra speed at the cost of them loosing all of their data...personally I'd just get another cheap IDE drive and backup files to that, and not bother with the raid at all.

 

[MisterDuck]

Oh yeah - I agree with others - ditch the sound card. That thing belongs in a museum. =)

I'd go with a Turtle Beach or a Philips Accoustic Edge. The Audigy is good, but I'm not too keen on the software it comes with and the menus are confusing and largly worthless.

Everything else looks swell, though.