Come on, like all the problems the KT133's had? You never had ANY problems
with them?
I wasn't using the defective SB cards so my exposure to the risk was
far less, but the KT133 falls under "for the most part", that I do
accept that the KT133 was paired with a southbridge that had PCI
problems in some situations, but in others it was just lower
performance. Having written that, I have set up KT133 based systems
and still regularly communicate with people who I've sold KT133 based
system, who use them every day without issue.
But should you buy hardware, try the drivers that come with it and find it
doesn't work right and then have to wait a few months for Via to write
drivers that do work before a system is stable? How many times has Via
released garbage drivers that cause all sorts of flakey problems? Again I'm
sick of paying to be a beta tester and having to work through all these
problems when I can buy another board and "putting-the-card-in-the-slot,
turning the box on" is all I have to do?
But it isn't that simple... Other Via chipsets SINCE the KT133A have
been no problem for me and many others, they were
"putting-the-card-in-the-slot, turning the box on" easy.
On the other hand I remember a few people bashig the SIS chipset
when their K7S5A boards were flaky, having nothing to do with the Sis
chipset, or various problems with nForce boards, including memory bugs
in nForce2 chipsets. We could point the finger at Via and ignore
other chipset problems but that doesn't assure a trouble-free
motherboard. Motherboards have to be considered on a case-by-case
basis. If you don't want a board with a Via chipset that's fine, but
your conclusion that it will be a problem to use one isn't usually
true.
It is possible Via boards have a higher problem rate but it's also
possible that these Via boards are being bought by a larger percentage
of do-it-yourselfers, who are trying to set up a system themselves
while the Intel CPU based "competition" boards use a far smaller
percentage of Via chipsets, are set up by professional OEM systems
integrators, a bit more likely to know what they're doing than the
avg. Joe would. This would tend to make people having non-Via boards
see fewer problems, but for different reasons. I don't think it's all
that surprising that someone might want to use the newest drivers for
a Via based board or any other manufacturer's product, but considering
this I do think Intel takes 1st place for doing the most testing
before releasing a component product.
As for the RAID controller, since there appears to be a large benefit
to choosing some other controller it may be good to avoid it, but
there isn't this clear disparity with Via chipsets in general beyond
the now-retired for years, 686 southbridge. Sometimes they are lower
performance but at lower cost, an acceptible tradeoff as with any
other hardware... is why we have benchmarks and reviews. Plenty of
reviewers set up and test Via-based boards without these problems you
imply.
Dave
