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VIA: what's myth and what's real?

C

ConnyG

Member
Hello all!

I've been thinking of getting a new computer soon to replace my P3-550. AMD definately has the price and performance advantage so I am thinking of going that route, however I am completely new to AMD systems. It seems that the best performance comes from VIA-bases motherboards, at least today. I have heard a lot of bad and good about VIA, poor IDE-performance, lock-ups, incompatibilies, etc. However, a lot of personal opinions always seem to go into these statements.

So, what I want are facts. What problems are known for sure, are there any incompatibilies or bugs that have been acknowledged. Does it perform poor in IDE prestanda or anything else? The chipset I am interested in is of course the KT266A.

Please, please, note that I am *NOT* interested in subjective opinions. Anyone can have bad luck. If you point out any good or bad sides with the chipset please back it up with links to test that have prooven the facts (from known hardware sites).

Also, I would like to know what drivers/patches/etc are recommended for a smooth running KT266A-based system.

Thanks in advance!
 
Bugs for sure are poor IDE performance, especially on boards with RAID controllers.
Also there is a common error/conflict with Geforce3 cards, VIa & Nvidia both state that it is the fault of the other side. The conflict/reason for lookUps is on the one hand agressive memory timing from Nvidia & poor memory controller on VIAs hand. So there is a patch available, you can find any files you need @

viaarena.com

over there you can also find a really good forum with many reports & bugfixes. Also in those forums there are some officials from VIA (Fiona Gatts & her husband Mr. Gatts) who somehow care about it. I spent 2 month in there trying to solve my problems. I wasn't able to fix them so i changed board/chipset btw.

The next Bug/error/problem is that with this chipset, M$ win2k & XP have often problems of finding your primary HDDs UDMA mode. mine was always displayed as pio mode only, measures showed it was even MoltiWord2 Mode, which leaded to a CPU usage of almost 100% when accessing something on my hdd, and coping times for small files which took longer than copying to a floppy.

This bug is solved on the one hand by M$ in the knowledge base, go there & search for UDMA5 & youll find the fix. On the other hand VIA offers a new released IDE driver who should solve it too.

You need the M$ patch if you have win 2k without service packs. The ServicePack does contain it too.

The next thing is the way you attach your IDE devices.

VIA has a list where they describe in which way you should connect the items for proper work.

Thats my two cents 😉
 
Well all I can go on is the ones I built, The last three two Asus one with raid and one without and a 8KHA+ Epox, KT266A chipsets, SoundBlaster, GeForce 3, I know people have talked about problems but I have yet to run into one and I didn't use any patches just the newest drivers and the Epox you couldn't ask for a more stable computer and with the XP1900 if it has a performance problem I want to keep that problem
 
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