Rumor: No more chipsets from VIA?

Albuquerque said:
I don't really have much love for their chipsets either, but I'd hate to see their very low power x86 options go completely away. I also wouldn't mind seeing them build another good audio solution like the Envy24 was back in the day. Creative needs some competition badly
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Creative's competition is Vista's audio platform.

Anyhow, it's kind of hard to even find via powered mobos anymore. Their chipsets have been clearly inferior to the competition since nforce2, and they haven't offered a competitive chipset since the early k8 days. Nvidia and Intel were almost always better performing, better featured, and often more stable/compatible as well (though not always).
May as well stick to their low power computer systems, a provider of platforms that use less than 20 watts and are used on farm to monitor invetro fertilization of cows (they have a video on their website).

I guess this is the end of Viaarena posting "hard core gamer machines" running with dual core athlon 4800+'s, the latest via chipset, dual unichrome graphics, and a bunch of chicks who obviously are only lanning up on doom 3 because they're paid to do so.
 
Interesting, use of Nvidia chipsets ends up being either a love it or hate it proposition. Personally, I've absolutely hated every single one of the Nforce boards I've used.

I much prefered ULi (pre-Nvidia aquisition), Intel, and even ATI to an extent over Nvidia chipsets for stability and performance. At least when it came to real world HD multi-tasking useage.

The Nvidia chipsets seemed to always do great if there was only one HD transfer going on, but once you had multiple HD accesses from multiple programs the Nvidia SATA implementation just seemed to fall apart compared to ULi, Intel and even ATI chipsets. And that was a biggie for me.

Not to mention every single Nforce board I've owned has died within 6 months to a year of use. I'm guessing just bad luck on my part. I still have Via, Sis, ATI, Intel, and Uli boards going strong though that I've since passed on to various family members.

Regards,
SB
 
What manufacturer and model nForce boards have you experienced?
 
I've used Asus, MSI, BFG (the worst of the bunch), and a couple other brands. I haven't tried the 680 chipset yet however, although I've heard that while it's great for dual cores it's not so great for quad cores. So for now I think I'll just stick with Intel chipsets for Intel CPUs for now.

However, I've recently come to own a Sun Ultra 40 M2. I must say I'm really impressed with the build quality of Sun systems. It uses the Nvidia C55? chipset I think with support for dual socket F. I'll see how this one holds up. I'm suspecting this should be a good one however, as I'd imagine workstation quality components will be better than their consumer desktop counterparts. Either way it'll be going through 24/7 use over the next couple months as I throw various things at it. I've read however that many suggest using an add in PCIE hard drive controller in place of the onboard Nvidia one. That doesn't sound very promising.

I'm just hoping that Sun will release a BIOS upgrade that allows the use of Barcelona quad cores when they come out.

Regards,
SB

PS - Yay, back to Japan tomorrow for another 2 months work before heading back to the US. I think my relatives here in Taiwan must have the absolute crappiest air conditioning unit, and that's not a good thing in Taiwan. :???:
 
The only problem I've ever had with VIA was trying to run two DDR400 sticks in my non-A KT400 board - the Apollo Pro 133A was particularly sweet, everything just worked with it (my first Creative is this Audigy4 though, so I dodged that bullet)... nForce2, GF6150, no problems I could remember.
 
From what I've read in the hardware forums, the Nvidia 680i motherboards have gone through a hardware revision to correct the issues with Quad Core cpus, so that issue has been solved.

I've dodged most of the Nvidia nForce2/nForce4 issues by not running their firewall software and using the MS drivers for the EIDE controllers.

I won't be missing VIA. Now if only AMD could make some decent products...
 
my PC right now has a KT333 with the USB2 southbridge (board is a Albatron KX400 pro). I can say it's been perfectly stable, with some useful BIOS options (such as forcing stand by into S3 mode), no hassle. bad overclocking but my CPU sucks at it (even on a high end DFI nf2 board)
It runs without the annoying northbridge fan (it was the most noisy part in my PC and wasn't really needed)
Not the best performer but I don't have to fear NV bugs such as the famous NF2 one.

I'd trust VIA again would I upgrade to AM2 socket, asus M2V feels about right for me.
 
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I endured the pure evil known as the ASUS P5A (SS7), and then a Gigabyte Slot-A offering. I was nearly scarred for life. I must say, though, that a later ASUS board using a VIA chipset for an overclocked Celerymine was extremely stable and ended up making yet another person happy when I sold the board and processor.

I just couldn't stand to be happy with the working Celerymine setup, so I got yet another VIA/AMD combo...:mad: After a multitude of lockups, system wipes, and BIOS flashes the drivers/AGP cards decided to play nice and it finally became stable. 100% of the VIA issues I had were directly related to the AGP slot. Even the Celerymine board had a strange issue - I had to disconnect the monitor cable when powering it on or it wouldn't POST :oops: . I also had a SoundBlaster Live! during that time and it had some issues until I fixed the PCI bus Latency, but honestly nothing ever came close to the issues I had with the combination of VIA chipsets + AGP. I was an extremely eager and enthusiastic adopter of PCI-e because of that.

I haven't had many issues with SIS chipsets for AMD - dirt cheap and solid as a rock as far as my experiences went - nor have I had too much trouble with ATI or NVidia boards, and I've built several of each. I can't recall building an Intel home box from scratch, but I've installed various OS's on a multitude of Intel servers without even a blip of an issue on the radar screen. Intel must have extremely tight quality control for their MBs, because not only are they rarely bugged, they don't seem to go bad all that often, either. I wish I could say that about every piece of hardware made!
 
caffeinated said:
I endured the pure evil known as the ASUS P5A (SS7)
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Just to be clear: that particular tough-love board was based on ALi Aladdin V...and if you could get the wonky AGP implementation working - big if, I know - it was actually a pretty decent board for overclocking.
 
anaqer said:
Just to be clear: that particular tough-love board was based on ALi Aladdin V...and if you could get the wonky AGP implementation working - big if, I know - it was actually a pretty decent board for overclocking.
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:oops: You are absolutely correct. :oops:

As for the rest of my comments regarding VIA's AGP complications, though, they still stand. If I never again see a set of 4-in-1's (Hyperions as they later called them) for the rest of my life, it will be too soon.
 
More disturbing news for competition (and consumers):

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipsets/display/20070907072516.html

Chipset Designers Flee from Via Technologies.

Via Technologies Loses Chipset VP, Design Team


Via Technologies, a struggling designer of chipsets and developer of central processing units (CPUs), has reportedly lost an executive who was in charge of the company’s chipset business along with a group of core-logic developers. The resignation of an exec spurred further rumours regarding the chipset business of Via.

Chewei Lin, vice president and general manager of Via’s platform business, according to a news-story at DigiTimes web-site, will resign from his post and take around 40 engineers from Via’ chipset research team to join integrated circuit designer ASMedia Technology, a subsidiary of Asustek Computer.

According to Via’s web-site, the company currently employs about 2000 of people, 70% of which, or 1400, are engineers, several hundreds of which (about 600, according to claims made by an S3 Graphics executive two years ago). While 40 chipset designers may not be a significant number for Via, considering that the company still has to sign a cross-license agreement with Intel Corp. to develop and sell chipsets for Intel’s chips in 2008, the future of Via’s chipset business looks gloomy.

Earlier this year it was reported that Via plans to switch its focus from third party chipsets to chipsets for its own C7 processor platform in order to lead the way for its own microprocessors to such markets as multimedia control, commercial embedded (thin clients, industrial PCs and point of sale terminals), home multimedia and mobile embedded (ultra-mobile devices, set-top boxes, LCD TVs and car electronics).

Via is reported to have stated that it had not heard of any group resignation, but it was normal for employees to leave after a reorganization.
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Well, that's really just getting rid of redundancies. As I said before I think, further restructuring is needed for VIA no matter what happens: if they don't get bought, they need to get rid of some stuff - and if they do get bought, they need to get rid of that stuff anyway because the only companies which might consider buying them (NVIDIA, maybe Intel?) don't need as much of it.

And I'm really not sure VIA being acquired would be "bad for competition". I think it's the other way around, actually...
 
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