To Via, of not to Via (that is the question)?

[wallie_x]

I've had horrible luck with stability problems with Via chipsets in the past. However, that was a while back. My last Via based mobo was a Tyan Trinity, with a Via KT-133A chipset. It still is one of the most temperamental computers I've ever built, despite swapping out mobos RMA, upgrading to Win XP and so many tweaks and attempted fixes that I must of logged 100 hours input time.
Since then I've switched to Sis based boards solely for their stability, despite their less than stellar performance benchmark wise.
I am currently shopping for a moderately priced board to build a friend a computer, and was wondering if Via ever cleaned up their stability issues and their horrible drivers? and

[Telexen]

I would only buy a board with the KT333...it was an excellent chipset and VIA has yet to truley top it...every other solution they have for Athlons has shown to be pretty much crap ... I'm thankful to nVidia for giving us a good chipset

[tony_j15]

Via makes good chipsets (my kt266a runs rock solid), but the best stuff out there right now uses nforce2.

[skuz]

I'm still using a KT133 chipset in my main box.

This chipset had problems with some video cards, including mine, it won't allow AGP 4x, only 2x and had problems with the SBLive, still a popular card.

Not all makers' iteration of this chipset had the problems, example, my Asus A7V-E will only allow my Radeon 9000 to run AGP 2x, but my Epox 8KTA2 runs a GeForce2 MX at AGP 4x. I prefer the Asus because the Epox can't take my 1300 Duron.

These two issues worried me a bit, so I'm pushing my unnecessary upgrade further, even though I haven't heard about these problems on KT266 and up.

The Nforce 1 and 2 still look too experimental to me.

[cbuddha42]

kt333 was a great chipset from my experiance (soyo kt333 ultra) so i would say 333 chip is a good option - if your looking at a 400 you probably might as well get an nforce2, dont think there is much price diffrence unless you buy a really top end nforce2 board

[cbuddha42]

tripple post

[cbuddha42]

sorry website didnt seem to be positng so i left ti a day and then came back and its post all of em

[pc_dr.j]

Get VIA if chipset is VIA KT266A or KT333.
Otherwise go for nVidia's nForce 2 especially the Ultra 400 series

[elroy]

The Nforce 2 Ultra 400 uses dual channel DDR - you must have 2 matching sticks of ram to get top performance
compared to the KT600 which runs approximately equal benchmarks without the dual channel feature- you can use a single piece of ram and get similar performance as the other board using 2 sticks
I've got 2 machines with VIA chipsets and have no problems with either one

[wallie_x]

Thanks for the input guys!
The guy I'm building this beast for is an old college math teacher. He still uses his old Mac to surf the web with 'Netscape'. Moreover, he's an 'Atari' junkie who still owns about 4 of those ancient video game consoles; and these are not your home versions, they stem all the way back to when you could only play them in a video arcade.
(Whew!! and I thought I was getting a little stuffy in my approaching old age!!) [Tail end of the baby boom]
He's even trying to con me into installing a newer Mac OS into this machine. I don't even know if a Mac OS will work with an IBM clone, let alone a Via based one, will it? (I stopped using Mac's when Apple computers took their famous tailspin fall from grace 10 or so years ago.) If Via had problems with Windows drivers, I doubt they spent much effort tuning any Mac drivers. Any rate, I got my homework cut-out for me. Win XP is a big improvement over any previous MS OS, I just hope I can convince him of such.
Thanks Again! wallie