VIA chipsets fixed (PCI issue)

[KuroNeko]

Tecchannel reports the latest VIA patch fixes the PCI issues plagueing all VIA chipsets. They also host the patch. Tecchannel says VIA chipsets are now equal to Intel's

I beg to differ a bit The Inquirer reported a while back that Intel's latest chipsets (850-860 series - see http://www.theinquirer.net/17010203.htm) also suffers from poor PCI performance. VIA may well have overtaken Intel now, at least for recent chipsets.

See: http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/11.html

Neko

[Damascus]

It's true, Intel's recent chipsets also suffer from this PCI 'issue' but that fact hasn't received nearly as much press. You have to like Intel's sense of humor though. "We have no plans to release a fix for this issue."

[Flying dutchman]

A word of warning to all:

I just downloaded and installed the 4-in-1 driver 4.37a from www.viatech.com and installed it on one of my PC's (a gigabyte GA-6VA7+ board with a Celery 800 cpu and Nvidia vanta graphics card)

It completely broke my Windows 2000 setup! The PC reboots and reboots in an endless loop. It won't even start in safe mode anymore. I guess I'll have to completely re-install everything.

Thanks for making my life miserable, VIA!

[Sciascia]

Sorry about that, I should have posted that I had the same problem with anything above 4.35 (I think). It completely botched my system. Of course I have since upgraded to Win98SE I am still not going to patch it with anything newer, although I did use the PCI bus patch from above. It did increase my HD throughput although very slightly.

[Flying dutchman]

I re-installed Windows 2000 from scratch today, then installed the VIA 4-in-1 version 4.37 plus the new PCI bandwidth patch. I had to remove a memory module or Windows 2000 wouldn't install, probably a bad DIMM ?

It does run more smoothly now than before - especially my Soundblaster PCI 64 audio quality has improved. No more clicks and dropouts when playing a VCD. But I have yet to install all my software on it to be certain...