VIA chipset flaw uncovered

[MrBumpy]

I just found this article. Maybe this explains some of the sound card problems that me and others have encountered using chipsets by this manufacturer. According to the article, Intel, ALi and SiS chipsets do not exhibit these problems.

This is sure making that Iwill XP-333 look more attractive

 

[conjur]

I'll second that IWill proclamation.

 

[Wind]

Yes...but there is a patch on here tht claimed can circumvent the flaw.

 

[AZGamer]

I find it interesting that the same people who call this a flaw are calling the nForce Superstability mode a feature.

 

[Peter]

Nice technical analysis ... now if only the fellows at tecchannel had the faintest idea about playing with a chipset's performance optimization registers (and the VIA chips have quite a lot of those!) .

So ... as a teacher I'd say well done, but incomplete, thus conclusions not valid.

After all, they contradict themselves by confessing that the "chipset flaw" can easily be remedied by programming it differently ...

It's a matter of fairness on the PCI bus - as a system designer, you need to decide whether you want good throughput from a single high performance card, or whether you want a good balance minimizing the risk of losing data from/to isochronous devices like sound or TV cards. To get the latter fairness, you need to limit burst lengths to give the next device a chance to win the bus and finish some of its stuff. You can't have both anymore with the level of saturation we now have on the PCI bus.

regards, Peter

 

[AkumaBao]

Nevermind.....I will.

 

[DClark]

That Via patch works well, even with my old Apollo Pro 133A board with the 686A south bridge (ATA66). Using Sandra's hard drive bench before the patch, I got:

Buffered read: 43MB/s
Buffered write: 30MB/s
Sequential write: 29MB/s

After the patch, I got:
Buffered read: 51MB/s (+8MB/s)
Buffered write: 37MB/s (+7MB/s)
Sequential write: 28MB/s (-1MB/s)

The other bench results (sequential read, random read, and random write) weren't affected, so I didn't bother listing them.

 

[panhead49]

from what i gather by reading replies at via. on the forums.....if it aint broke....dont install it......

 

[Wind]

<< from what i gather by reading replies at via. on the forums.....if it aint broke....dont install it...... >>


Install it...it still won't break anything. U don't like it, just uninstall it from the Win add/remove prog...simple.