~misfit~ wrote:

Dave C. wrote:

"maggot" wrote in message
. ..

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 15:38:28 -0400, "Dave C." wrote:



Why? You got something against incredibly high 3DMark scores in an
extremely stable system? -Dave


Bad history with VIA, That's how you lose customers. Anandtech
recommends the Epox 8KDA3+ which is Nforce3 250gb chipset.

And that's not a bad recommendation. It doesn't necessarily mean
that one is better than the other, though. I see outrageous claims
all the time like "AMD SUCKS" or "AMD ROCKS" or "VIA SUCKS". Claims
like that are clearly based on ignorance. For the most part, AMD is
usually a better deal than Intel, but I'm open-minded enough to build
Intel if it's a better value for what I'm trying to accomplish. Same
with via . . . I know there are better chipsets available, but that
doesn't necessarily mean there is anything wrong with via. My own
primary system is an nforce2, but I just built a via chipset system
for a friend of mine, and I'm tempted to steal it. It's THAT good.
Nobody is doing anybody any favors by steering them away from via.
Any system you build with via will work great, as long as you don't
make the common errors that many builders make, such as cheap power
supply, no-name RAM, etc. In short, if you don't like via, learn to
build a good system. If you don't learn to build a good system, don't
blame the chipset (or the CPU or the video card or the ???) for your
problems. -Dave


How utterly arrogant of you. I, like maggot, dislike VIA chipsets. I hold
this opinion through several years experience of building quite a few
computers, for myself, family, friends and friends of family/friends. I have
used chipsets from Intel, VIA, nVidia, SIS and Ali, probably more too. I
*know* how to build a good system (I don't want them coming back with
problems if I can aviod it) and one of the first rules of building a good
system for performance is 'Don't use a VIA chipset board'.

Oh sure, you can get them running stably and reliably if you know what
you're doing but you won't get the full potential performance out of your
CPU/peripherals. I keep a book detailing all the builds I do and benchmark
results from a battery of benchmarks for each build. I have used the same
CPU in several different mobo's. For a while I went through a
'data-gathering' phase, building and re-building systems with differing
combinations of hardware. I have never seen a VIA chipset board out-perform
a non-VIA board. Ever. In fact the general trend, going from my data
gathered over several years and close to a hundred systems is that VIA
boards tend to run between 5% and 20% slower than competing boards. I no
longer build systems on VIA boards unless the person I'm building for
absolutely insists or comes to me with the parts.

Hardware is my hobby and my passion. I overclock all my own systems. Here's
an example for you from my records:

Celeron Tualatin 1.4Ghz on Gigabyte/VIA board:

100FSB (1.4Ghz) 87.3 CPU Mark 99 marks
110FSB (1.54Ghz) 98.6 marks
115FSB (1.61Ghz) 105 marks.

Same CPU in an MSI/Intel 440BX board (with adapter):

100FSB 110 marks
110FSB 118 marks
115FSB 127 marks

(All settings tested extensively with Prime95 for stability)

Well, not all VIA chipsets have the same performance so I don't think it's
quite fair to base a generic condemnation on one version.

I still think the major difference is that VIA mobo has built in video with
it's frame buffer taken from main memory and it's sucking up memory
bandwidth with constant display refresh.

Having said that, I think even the 'best' of the socket 370 VIA SDR SDRAM
chipsets lagged behind the BX by a couple % in memory bandwidth, but it was
closer than the others.


That last build is how I left it, it's one of my SETI boxes, been running
perfectly 24/7 for a while now. Incidently it benchmarks almost identically
to an XP2000+/VIA chipset build I did (under duress) a short while ago.

Wanna buy the VIA board? It's sitting on a shelf, along with three other VIA
boards. One of which was in own system, I bought it at a PC builder's
liquidation auction, which I replaced with an nForce board. (I wonder if the
fact that they used VIA boards almost exclusively had anything to do with
them going into liquidation?)
--
~misfit~