Via 686B slower then 686A

[Gothmoth]

from an artikel on www.tomshardware.com:


The new VIA-Southbridge with ATA/100 functionality leaves a stale taste. Especially when used with a single hard drive - as most computers are operated nowadays -, boards with this chip run slower than their ATA/66 pendants in the field of 3D games and OpenGL applications. The ATA/100 chip only leads to a slight improvement in system performance with classic 2D office programmes if you own a modern hard drive. It seems that VIA should revise the VT82C686B-Southbridge, otherwise the ATA/100 option as sales argument may go up in smoke.

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sounds bad. and the benchmarks are bad too.

 

[jaeger66]

I wouldn't trust Tom's to correctly identify the time of day.

 

[Davegod75]

yeah...tom is iffy with his info sometimes, especially when it comes to AMD and VIA

 

[Gothmoth]

mhm

i dont think tom pabst is to stupid to do some benchmarks

there must be some reason....

 

[Nikepete]

That's the reason why I bought a motherboard with RAID: I can use third party's drivers (HPT or Promise) to maximize the drive's performance without relying on the chipset. BTW, Win2K does not support (yet) ATA100 and the best you can get is ATA66. Service Pack 2 will but who knows when Microsoft will release it. So for now, only Win98/WinME supports ATA100 natively and my OS is Win2K.

 

[Gothmoth]

read the review on tomshardware.

i think it dont matters if you USE the Via ATA100 controller.

if a via 686B southbridge is on the mainboard it will slow down the northbridge, even if you have a scsi system.

"In the last motherboard article, we observed a strange effect. The boards we presented in this article with the new ATA/100-Southbridge admittedly performed very well during hard disk-intensive applications in the office field (Sysmark results), but the new Southbridge seems to have a negative effect on the Northbridge of the KT133 chip set. The Northbridge controls the AGP bus for the graphic card as well as the data exchange between CPU and memory. Therefore, the results of the 3D games and the OpenGL tests can only be described as uniformly bad."

 

[holdencommodore]

This all seems very strange...
IF there is a problem, we'll have to see if it can be resolved in either BIOS update or new VIA driver revisions...