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.

(snip)

I dare to post facts rather than opinions, and that makes me arrogant
somehow? There are several chipset makers, and all of them (specifically
including VIA) have had the performance edge at various times until the
competition fired their next volley. To make a blanket statement like "
'one of the first rules of building a good system for performance is 'Don't
use a VIA chipset board' " is just plain stupid.

In fact, until the nforce3 250 went live, the VIA K8T800 was arguably the
best choice for Athlon64. Even now, the performance numbers between VIA,
SIS and nvidia are virtually identical, if you are building on the Athlon64
platform. That would make VIA a wise choice based on selection of
mainboards and price, though you'll find some good nforce3 250 boards
competitively priced, also.

If you are building a P4, the best value in chipsets at the moment would be
SIS, VIA and Intel in that order (though not too many boards use the SIS
655TX). While the three chipsets have performance numbers that are
virtually identical, each has its own price point and its own strengths and
weaknesses. If you want a good gaming system that won't cost an arm and a
leg, VIA PT880 is a good choice for the P4 at the moment. The Intel 875P
will offer virtually identical performance to the VIA PT880, but the 875P
also costs more. The 655TX is a little faster than VIA PT880, but the
selection of those boards is somewhat limited. All things considered, VIA
PT880 would be the best choice for many P4 builders, at the moment.

Note I said 'at the moment' as the technology is constantly changing. I
don't doubt that you benchmarked a celeron on a Intel BX board faster than a
similar VIA chipset board. AT THAT MOMENT, the Intel chipset was clearly
better. You are doing nobody any favors (least of all yourself) by
automatically dismissing any motherboard with a via chipset. Depending on
when you build, VIA might be the best choice. Yes, for performance,
lso. -Dave