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**Ray Austin** · 30 August 2003, 19:58

Via offers some impressive eye-candy and make the buyer believe they are getting a good deal when in reality you aren't. If you stress the machine you will know it.

If all you do is surf the net and type letters and maybe play a few slow games you should be ok, other than that Via is all hype.

The mother board is the most important part of the system, if it doesn't do the job nothing will work right.... crash, crash, crash if you get the point.

I had a via board before, not much has changed.

**funky-d-munky** · 30 August 2003, 20:34

These Via boards don't crash, crash, crash. Not in this day and age. I asked for unbiased opinions.
I have many Via boards and I work them hard.
But I want to know if the new redesigned Southbridge really fixes some of the heavy bandwidth issues. No review sites ever touch usefull issues like these.
Also I would like to point out that in the high tech computer parts biz, companies can change 100% from one generation to the next.
Eg. IBM HD, ATi grafix cards, Matrox graphics cards, Amd processors. So lets not judge to quick.

**MultimediaMan** · 30 August 2003, 21:12

Can't argue with that Funky...

Hell, I put together a low to mid-range KT333 machine for my wife expecting the worst but it has so far been 100% Stable: Gigabyte GA-7VRXP 2.0: onboard Creative 5880 Sound, Realtek LAN and Promise IDE RAID, 512MB RAM and an XP1600...

Regarding the KT600: not many manufacturers have been pimping out the chipset with full-featured boards yet, but so far they seem to bench quite well.

**Elie** · 30 August 2003, 21:17

Originally posted by funky-d-munky
These Via boards don't crash, crash, crash. Not in this day and age. I asked for unbiased opinions.
I have many Via boards and I work them hard.
But I want to know if the new redesigned Southbridge really fixes some of the heavy bandwidth issues. No review sites ever touch usefull issues like these.
Also I would like to point out that in the high tech computer parts biz, companies can change 100% from one generation to the next.
Eg. IBM HD, ATi grafix cards, Matrox graphics cards, Amd processors. So lets not judge to quick.

NO, you haven't worked any of them hard until you use the PCI bus with a card like the RT2000/Rt.X100 etc.

Then you will dump every single one of them after realizing the PCI bandwidth issues that plague VIA since the beginning.

Cheers,
Elie

**Chrono_Wanderer** · 30 August 2003, 22:36

yea... even Matrox themselves say this. They say non of the VIA chips work with the RT cards... so you can get the idea of how their PCI bridge is like.

For general usage, its good. But I will not go there for further expandibility i.e. vid cap. I'd rather get an nForce 2 400 instead.

I never used a VIA baord, but I also heard their drivers do suck.

**funky-d-munky** · 30 August 2003, 22:39

Yes true Elie, and if I owned such a card I wouldn't put it in one of my old VIA's. But I do used them in a hard'ish fashion(are you at least gonna give me that?) and they don't crash like Ray was saying.

"Then you will dump every single one of them after realizing the PCI bandwidth issues that plague VIA since the beginning."

So Elie you are saying with some certainty that the KT-600 has not improved this situation? Any reviews or benchmarks you could point me to that will back this up?
Cheers,
funky

**funky-d-munky** · 30 August 2003, 22:44

Chrono_Wanderer, again I am quite knowledgable of VIA chipset deficiencies, but I am asking about the new KT-600.
I know as a fact it offers better bandwidth than a Nforce2, but that chipset isn't supposed to be the greatest for bandwidth either.
funky

**Jkun** · 31 August 2003, 04:10

I own a few VIA boards for non-video work. Work like a charm in 24/24 operation, and don't have the IDE issues that plague nForce2.

Most people here are very biased against VIA because of this, but as you can see from comments, most talk alot but never even owned one.

Previous VIA chipsets DO however have limited bandwidth, so video work like RT2000 cards do is not good on VIA.

Therefor, I'm very interested in your claim that it is better than nForce2. Where did you read this? nForce have 110MB bandwidth, regular, but have some compatibility issues that make it fall over and drop to 20MB in certain situations (C't test - solid state harddisk writes - never found out why and Nvidia isn't helping at all).

J-kun

**funky-d-munky** · 31 August 2003, 10:13

Review sites keep touting the southbridge SATA raid as being a big advantage over the Nforce 2 solutions. It is also suppossed to have a bottleneck reduced Northbridge/Southbridge design compared to olderchipsets. I just coupled that with many on this board not recommending NF2 boards, but SiS boards because of their advantage in this area.
But again info is hard to find. Review sites never give you real world benches on such stuff.
That is why I posted. Does anyone really know?

**davpen** · 31 August 2003, 17:11

For what it is worth I have had a couple of VIA based motherboards. KT-133a and Apollo Pro 133. Both have been totally realiable and as general everyday workhorses they are fine.

The PCI issues do exist. I could never do half/full res uncompressed captures with a Rainbow Runner G with these boards. But with an ADVC-100 and a cheap firewire card I never had a problem.

But, like most people on this forum, I wouldn't recommend a VIA board for video work. At least not until I had reasonable confirmation that they had fixed the PCI issues (which was the original question in this thread to which I have no answer).

But for most other applications VIA boards would be a perfectly good and reliable choice.

David.

**Ray Austin** · 31 August 2003, 20:40

Originally posted by funky-d-munky
These Via boards don't crash, crash, crash. Not in this day and age. I asked for unbiased opinions.
I have many Via boards and I work them hard.

Well I have a RT2000 and G400 dual set cards that could bring it to it's knees not to mention the RTX100... at least that's what I was getting at with the crash, crash, crash remark.

I had the Tyan tiger dual P3 board that was a via based board and although this board could perform well on most venues it didn't take much for the RT2000 to crash it. [Even tho this is an old board Via still has issues, just check any video capture card vendor's recommended list.]

So if Via didn't have problems with PCI bandwidth Video capture cards would be able to operate without crashing/ freezing etc.

I am unbiased, Via is responsible for making junk not me.

**funky-d-munky** · 1 September 2003, 14:04

If anyone come accross a review or benches of how the PCI bus pans out on these new boards, could you please post a link in this thread.
Thanks
funky

**Belwarrior** · 1 September 2003, 20:36

dont think the links are that relevant but at least u can get the rough idea of how it will perform (kt600 and a sis748)

Soltek KT600-R: Fast & Promising

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1852&p=12

DFI 748-AL: First Look at SiS 748

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1850&p=13

ps. those are the conclusion pages.. browse to the content benchmarks..

**funky-d-munky** · 1 September 2003, 21:51

Yes I have seen a few general reviews and the boards seem great for the price.
But I am looking for specific PCI bus bandwidth info.

Announcement

Via KT-600

Via KT-600

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