X-bit labs - Hardware news - VIA Makes Another Attempt to Re-Enter
Chipset Market.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...122145105.html

VIA has lost a lot of ground to Nvidia and ATI in the chipset market.
It's probably not surprising, given their poor reputation for quality.
Known more for their compatibility glitches, I think they're even behind
SIS nowadays in marketshare. So they've upgraded K8T890 to K8T900.

> Neither of recently announced high-end chipsets from VIA Technologies aimed at AMD64 platform, such as K8T890-series products, were adopted massively. With the K8T900 the company may have hopes to regain positions. However, the designer did not mention of a single mainboard maker to be planning products that utilise VIA K8T900 core-logic.

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:50:55 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>X-bit labs - Hardware news - VIA Makes Another Attempt to Re-Enter
>Chipset Market.
>http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...122145105.html
>
>VIA has lost a lot of ground to Nvidia and ATI in the chipset market.
>It's probably not surprising, given their poor reputation for quality.
>Known more for their compatibility glitches, I think they're even behind
>SIS nowadays in marketshare. So they've upgraded K8T890 to K8T900.
>
>> Neither of recently announced high-end chipsets from VIA Technologies aimed at AMD64 platform, such as K8T890-series products, were adopted massively. With the K8T900 the company may have hopes to regain positions. However, the designer did not mention of a single mainboard maker to be planning products that utilise VIA K8T900 core-logic.

I don't know how nVidia gets away with what they do - the complaints are
think & fast and they have no end user support at all. If you have a
problem there is nowhere to even make it known.... corruption of disk
transfers... a NI which just doesn't work right: checksum offload has
errors. I'm getting a little ****ed with them.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

George Macdonald wrote:
> I don't know how nVidia gets away with what they do - the complaints are
> think & fast and they have no end user support at all. If you have a
> problem there is nowhere to even make it known.... corruption of disk
> transfers... a NI which just doesn't work right: checksum offload has
> errors. I'm getting a little ****ed with them.
>

What are you talking about?

Yousuf Khan

It's kind of strange that most windows user's like Nvidia, and most
Linux users like VIA. It seems that VIA has a better open source
approach then Nvidia. For example how long has Gnu/Linux users been
waiting for SLI, its been out for how long? Not to mention that VIA has
usually had good support from the Linux kernel developers.

I use Nvidia GPU's but I would think twice about getting a Nvidia based
Motherboard to use in Linux. I would probably opt for VIA. One thing is
for sure I would not get an ATI based machine.

Gnu_Raiz

It's kind of strange that most windows user's like Nvidia, and most
Linux users like VIA. It seems that VIA has a better open source
approach then Nvidia. For example how long has Gnu/Linux users been
waiting for SLI, its been out for how long? Not to mention that VIA has
usually had good support from the Linux kernel developers.

I use Nvidia GPU's but I would think twice about getting a Nvidia based
Motherboard to use in Linux. I would probably opt for VIA. One thing is
for sure I would not get an ATI based machine.

Gnu_Raiz

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:50:55 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>X-bit labs - Hardware news - VIA Makes Another Attempt to Re-Enter
>Chipset Market.
>http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...122145105.html
>
>VIA has lost a lot of ground to Nvidia and ATI in the chipset market.
>It's probably not surprising, given their poor reputation for quality.
>Known more for their compatibility glitches, I think they're even behind
>SIS nowadays in marketshare. So they've upgraded K8T890 to K8T900.
>
>> Neither of recently announced high-end chipsets from VIA Technologies aimed at AMD64 platform, such as K8T890-series products, were adopted massively. With the K8T900 the company may have hopes to regain positions. However, the designer did not mention of a single mainboard maker to be planning products that utilise VIA K8T900 core-logic.

Actually k8t800 AGP chipset was quite popular and quite good - I have
a dual opteron board with k8t800, and can't complain about either
performance or stability. But looks like they missed PCIe bus.

NNN

"Yousuf Khan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:6rTgf.3326$(E-Mail Removed)...
> X-bit labs - Hardware news - VIA Makes Another Attempt to Re-Enter
> Chipset Market.
> http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...122145105.html
>
> VIA has lost a lot of ground to Nvidia and ATI in the chipset
market.
> It's probably not surprising, given their poor reputation for
quality.
> Known more for their compatibility glitches, I think they're even
behind
> SIS nowadays in marketshare. So they've upgraded K8T890 to K8T900.
>
> > Neither of recently announced high-end chipsets from VIA
Technologies aimed at AMD64 platform, such as K8T890-series products,
were adopted massively. With the K8T900 the company may have hopes to
regain positions. However, the designer did not mention of a single
mainboard maker to be planning products that utilise VIA K8T900
core-logic.

VIA just announced sampling on Nov 22. Which suppliers are expected
to announce they are planning products even before receiving, much
less evaluating, those samples? ;-)

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:12:06 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>George Macdonald wrote:
>> I don't know how nVidia gets away with what they do - the complaints are
>> think & fast and they have no end user support at all. If you have a
>> problem there is nowhere to even make it known.... corruption of disk
>> transfers... a NI which just doesn't work right: checksum offload has
>> errors. I'm getting a little ****ed with them.
>>
>
>What are you talking about?

nVidia has problems - check http://forums.nvidia.com/. The recent nForce4
has had corruption problems with some hard disks on SATA. nVidia still
denies it and says Maxtor has fessed up but Maxtor denies it - similar
probs have been seen on Western Digital drives; either way there *is* a
problem and one could hope for better discussion of the issue than posting
on nVidia's forum, with the hope that just *maybe* an nVidia employee
*might* happen by and notice and *might* feel inclined to do something.
Their silence is aggravating.

The nForce chipsets with Gb NIs have a hardware bug which seems to only
manifest in a few situations. I've seen it when working as a nForce3 & 4
client to some mail servers: 1) with Eudora as a mail client, sendmail just
eventually fails with a 10053 or 10054 Eudora error code (a Google search
on "Eudora 10053" will turn up the complaints); 2) trying to upload HDTach
results eventually fails silently. In both cases the fix is to disable
checksum offload in the network driver which, of course, cancels out their
wild performance claims. Actually I'd appreciate it if anyone who has an
nForce3/4 chipset could try an HDTach results upload and post their
experience, just to confirm reproducibility. The error only seems to
happen with large e-mails (HDTach just e-mails its results to Simpli's
mailserver) so it could the length or it could be content sensitive.

Also check out the table of "compatibility" here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/motherboards.html. It's a bloody mess and is
apparently not the whole story: nVidia's Network Access Manager rarely
works at all - the hardware firewall, is basically unuseable for most
people. In the above table, the "Hardware Network Engine" does not work
with any nForce3 mbrd and several nForce4 mbrds but nowhere on their site,
that I can find, does nVidia tell what "Hardware Network Engine" really
does. There's some suggestion that it's the mechanism which allows
bypassing the OS network stack and performing DMA directly to the
application memory space but it's hard to pin down and impossible to figure
what (not) to do to avoid problems or which software to (not) use.

On top of all the above, the nVidia drivers are going from bad to worse -
every new iteration brings new problems and may or may not fix old ones; it
reminds me of the way video drivers were rigged to wring out extravagant
performance numbers at the expense of system stability.

Quite honestly I'm getting fed-up with this, especially nVidia's refusal to
even listen to end users. I hope VIA makes a comeback - at least they
listen.:-)

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

George Macdonald wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:12:06 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>What are you talking about?
>
>
> nVidia has problems - check http://forums.nvidia.com/. The recent nForce4
> has had corruption problems with some hard disks on SATA. nVidia still
> denies it and says Maxtor has fessed up but Maxtor denies it - similar
> probs have been seen on Western Digital drives; either way there *is* a
> problem and one could hope for better discussion of the issue than posting
> on nVidia's forum, with the hope that just *maybe* an nVidia employee
> *might* happen by and notice and *might* feel inclined to do something.
> Their silence is aggravating.

Is this in a server environment?

Yousuf Khan

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:54:31 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>George Macdonald wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:12:06 -0500, Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>>What are you talking about?
>>
>>
>> nVidia has problems - check http://forums.nvidia.com/. The recent nForce4
>> has had corruption problems with some hard disks on SATA. nVidia still
>> denies it and says Maxtor has fessed up but Maxtor denies it - similar
>> probs have been seen on Western Digital drives; either way there *is* a
>> problem and one could hope for better discussion of the issue than posting
>> on nVidia's forum, with the hope that just *maybe* an nVidia employee
>> *might* happen by and notice and *might* feel inclined to do something.
>> Their silence is aggravating.
>
>Is this in a server environment?

What's the difference? I've no experience with this particular one myself
- I have a nForce4 mbrd in our server but I stuck with my hot-swappable
Promise-based mirror for that. I believe the reports are on desktops
though judging by the people posting on the forum.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald