Just a lot of driver issues. This may have also been because back then I was
using Windows 98 and earlier on those systems, where drivers are just so
finicky to install and uninstall. If you ever change your processor or
motherboard to any other brand after you've had a VIA, you're going to have
a wonderful time with getting your OS back in working order again.
Before Win98, Intel had driver issues with i430HX et.al. as well as some
versions of the North Bridge which were broken. Surely you remember the
Win95 Bus Mastering driver of the month saga, which initially had no
uninstall procedure and you had to go through all the rigmarole of removing
..inf files, drivers and devices from device manager as each succeeding
version came out. Of course if you upgraded to Win98 without uninstalling
the Intel drivers.....BOOM!
No, apart from their reluctance to issue Errata Sheets, VIA's main problem
was that hardware add-in vendors, sound and other cards, CD/R-RW drives did
not validate their hardware with the VIA chipset.
With Win9x I've gone through several generations of chipsets, including to
and from VIA without a reinstall, the last from a VIA VP2 to a i440BX. You
just have to know how to do it and how to cope with any glitches along the
way.
But I have installed VIA based systems since those days for friends, but I
usually tell them strongly to avoid them if at all possible. If it's a
matter of cost, then I can't argue with them, VIA boards do often tend to be
cheaper than Nvidia, and more available than SiS.
For an Athlon64 system there isn't much else around other than VIA...
unless you want to use the nForce3 150 HT hobbled chipset. In fact some
mfrs, like MSI, have just avoided making nForce 150 mbrds. I've just done
a VIA K8T800 system because I got tired of waiting for nForce3 250 *and* I
expect it to be positioned at the high $$ end anyway.
This was a MSI K8T Neo mbrd and WinXP install went very smoothly and no
problems observed so far. VIA should look into this 4-in-1 thing though
and clean up the IDE filter/miniport driver confusion. One minor annoyance
with the system which is not unique to VIA, AFAICT, is that the HDD LED
does not work with a SATA drive. I'm not sure how much this is a hardware
problem with the mbrd - it appears that with *some* mfrs' mbrds a BIOS
update can fix it, while others need a new rev of the mbrd.
Rgds, George Macdonald
"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??
and yes this is my first VIA but i read the reviews that AMD64 boards