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Hardware

Socket-A Chipset Roundup 144

Posted by CmdrTaco from the little-bit-of-this-a-little-bit-of-that dept.
EconolineCrush writes: "The Tech Report has a review up of VIA's new KT333 Socket A chipset. Though it's really a review of the KT333, a total of seven different chipsets from VIA, SiS, AMD, and NVIDIA are compared to determine the uniprocessor Socket A performance king. This is definitely worth checking out if you're in the market for an AMD platform, or are curious to see how your current chipset stacks up against the latest and greatest."
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Socket-A Chipset Roundup More

Socket-A Chipset Roundup

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  • Stability, or performance? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by clockwork18 ( 237920 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @06:59PM (#3048137)
    Perhaps they should be reviewing the total stability of any given solution. I for one know that I used to have an Iwill board based on the ALi MaGIK chipset, and it was a hell of a lot more stable than my current KT266A.

    • I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:

      Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)


      ---
      Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]
      • If your running pc133 ram thats cas3... buy better ram.. Anyt decent ram your going to buy is to be cas 2 or 2.5... But dont buy ram on sale at frys electronics and expect miracles...
      • The ASUS A7M266 uses an AMD 761 chipset (not a Via chipset)- which is WHY this mobo works well... there is a Via southbridge, but it is a non-issue in win xp.
      • I have a MB based of the ALI Magik1 chipset with a Duron 750 and PC2100 Cas 2.5 DDR Ram. As far as I know the Duron itself will not permit being run with anything other than a 100 mhz bus, (or 200mhz bus in the case of DDR Ram). I would recommend buying a 133mhz/266mhz rated Athlon CPU if you really want that 133mhz ram speed.

        • As far as I know the Duron itself will not permit being run with anything other than a 100 mhz bus,

          That's true. However, this particular board is an ABIT KT7A, which has an option to run the RAM bus at host clock + PCI clock, = 133 MHz. It works fine with a single 128MB PC133 DIMM (NEC, not sure of CAS rating, it's "virtual channel memory" -- anyone else remember virtual channel memory? :-), also with dual 256MB PC133 DIMM's (CAS 2, Crucial), but with a 512MB CAS3 DIMM (also Crucial), it won't post with 133MHz RAM clock. With 100 MHz RAM clock, it works just fine (of course). Oh well, that's my worst system anyway, so who cares. Thanks for your comments though.


          ---
          Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]
          • I shorted the L1 bridges on my 800MHz Duron. It's on my KT7A-Raid running at 933MHz. I'm using CAS 2 Crucial PC133 memory. Runs nice and stable and fairly fast. I need to dump the Matrox G400 tho. Probably go with a GF2 to hold me over till the next motherboard. Then the KT7A-RAID will become my server.
      • random lockups with the GeForce2

        Checked your AGP driving values?

        • Sure, I tried pretty much every value from 0xB0 to 0xFF in steps of four over a period of about two weeks. I could never figure out what *exactly* the AGP driving value meant, though (need to bust out the reference books [amazon.com]), so maybe the right answer was somewhere outside that range. It's a moot issue at this point though, since that motherboard (KT7A-RAID) is dead (oops).

          I always wonder if it was some kind of Freudian slip when I killed that motherboard. :-)

          ---
          Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf! [zappadoodle.com]
          • Sure, I tried pretty much every value from 0xB0 to 0xFF in steps of four.

            I've hear it best ends with A. So by checking things ending with 0 4 8 and C you've missed it.

            Try DA or EA I think.

            You killed a KT7A-R!?!? Anything nonobvious (since I have one)?
      • FWIW, I've had fairly decent luck with VIA chipsets. They had a problem for a while with their IDE drivers that would keep my tape drive from working, but sticking with the Microsoft-supplied drivers worked well enough until VIA could get its act together. Other than that, I've run everything AMD from the K6 to the Athlon on various VIA chipsets, and I've worked with a few Intel-processor systems with VIA chipsets. Nothing's acted squirelly on me.

        That said, the machine I'm typing on now uses a "hybrid" AMD 761/VIA 686B chipset, and it's run Win2K flawlessly. I built a couple of Athlon XP boxen for work that use the nVidia nForce 420D chipset; the idea of an integrated-everything chipset where the integrated stuff doesn't suck was appealing. One runs Win2K; the other runs Linux From Scratch. The home server is a dual P!!! on one of Intel's 440BX server boards; it works well enough, but about the only real problem I've had with anybody's chipset has been with the IDE controller in some of Intel's 430?X chipsets...hook up a hard drive as primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master, and it might not see the CD-ROM under Win9x. Figure that one out.

        • >the only real problem I've had with anybody's >chipset has been with the IDE controller in some of >Intel's 430?X chipsets...hook up a hard drive as >primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master, >and it might not see the CD-ROM under Win9x. Figure >that one out.

          Probably a cdrom issue. Some older cdroms (= 6x ?) seem to need the controller in the hard drive to control the bus. Try using a newer drive and I bet it'll work.
        • ""hybrid" AMD 761/VIA 686B chipset"

          Me too: the epox board. I have the raid model, and it has been wonderful - until I installed XP. Crazy errors, blue screens. I tried everything I could think of (replacing mobo, HD, etc) but it still wouldn't work. I ended up having to disable the onboard RAID, and it has been super stable ever since. Go figure. If I wasn't using a SCSI controller, I'd be kinda pissed. I wrote epox and asked about this "known issue" and they decided not to respond.
    • Agreed ... after all they problems I had with USB on the KT266 (non-A)boards, I'll glady ignore anything by VIA.
    • You're kidding right? I run windows xp of all things on an Asus A7V266E board and its rock solid.
      • The A7V266E is a damn good board, everytime it crashed it was an Nvidia driver BSOD with conflicts with DirectX. Really happy after I found the beta bios drivers on the germany asus ftp site. :) ME lub the google search.
    • Well, considering the people currently writing reviews are using reference designs, I think full scale stability testing is premature.

    • Perhaps they should be reviewing the total stability of any given solution.

      Well, they commented on instability where they encountered it. One of the tested motherboards they had to reduce the memory timings to make it stable. The others were stable throughout their benchmarking.

      I for one know that I used to have an Iwill board based on the ALi MaGIK chipset, and it was a hell of a lot more stable than my current KT266A.

      There's more to a motherboard than just the chipset. I have an Epox 8KHA+, which has a KT266A, and it's the first PC I've ever owned that doesn't suffer from random lockups when hammering the AGP bus. So I infer that your problem was, in fact, caused by something other than the KT266A chipset.

      • I will totally agree with you on the fact that there's more to a motherboard than just the chipset. As an OEM, however, I have to tell you that we had to be very picky about what we built systems with. We would begin by using a sampling of motherboards, and then we would stick with the one with the fewest problems. Many of the boards would have a tough time just getting through the setup for whatever OS was put on it. Quality power supply, quality cooling, and quality RAM sometimes just aren't enough to get a motherboard ROCK SOLID. The only ones, as I said before, that performed PERFECTLY were the ALi Magik chipset boards.
        --
    • I've yet to see a crash on my AMD760 ASUS board. It's middle of the pack in performance (read: more than you'll ever need) and rock solid. VIA has a bad rep, no doubt, but this box just works. Maybe you're running a microsoft OS? Or using lots of 3rd-party binary-only drivers including one that's known to trigger AGP-related crashes? My system is Microsoft, nvidia, and binary-only-driver free; it seems to help a lot.
    • Thanks for pointing this out. I was thinking that maybe I should dump my old Iwill board, but its been running FreeBSD and has done a few "make worlds" with absolutely no problems.
    • The whole issue of stability is kinda stupid. If a mobo doesn't have some major bug (I remember a couple intel chipsets that caused major problems with the third ram slot back when pc100 was prominen) then you are probably going to have far more crashes from power fluxuations/failures, bad ram, or bad drivers. It's pretty rare that the mobo causes the crash.

      Anyway, last September I got a Abit K7-Raid and I've been VERY happy with it. It can handle up to 8 IDE drives, 4 DDR slots (only 2 work with non-ecc though...), and it has 5 PCI slots. No audio though.

      The Abit KG7 series boards also have an awesome bios. I overclocked my Tbird 1400 to 1533 without evening opening the case--it's all in the Bios! I also have 3 HDs in it with 3 different OS's on them (RH7.2, win98, and a flavor-o-the-week) and NO LILO OR GRUB!!! Each HD has a normal boot partition for it's respective OS and if I want to boot to a different one, I just have to hit delete to enter the bios at reboot and respecify which HD to boot from. I find that having my bios control which drive to boot from is as easy and more reliable than lilo or grub because each OS gets a complete boot partition to itself. There is a drawback in that you need a seperate HD for each OS, but with the KG7-Raid, you can fit up to 8 IDE drive in there and boot from any of them.

  • More on this elite chipset... (Score:4, Informative)

    by arnoroefs2000 ( 122990 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @07:03PM (#3048157) Homepage

    Tom's Hardware has a good article [tomshardware.com] up.

    "A total of 26 various benchmark tests clearly shows that the VIA KT333 chipset the best and most capable chipset for AMD CPUs. With only a few exceptions, not even the Nvidia nForce with its expensive dual-channel technology (DDR266) can put up a real fight against the newcomer KT333. With the launch of the KT333, the KT266A will become a thing of the past - you simply won't want to miss out on all the new features such as ATA/133, USB 2.0 or DDR333 support."

    So does Anandtech: here [anandtech.com].

    "When the KT266A was launched it completely blew us away; the performance of the chipset was spectacular and it was clear that it would quickly become a top pick for all Athlon owners. The KT333 doesn't have nearly as great of an impact but the reasons behind that are understandable; both new features supported by the chipset, DDR333 and Ultra ATA 133 aren't features that will result in tangible improvements in performance today. Instead the KT333 is more of a technology enabling platform for VIA. The chipset will not cost any more to manufacture than the KT266A and thus motherboards won't increase in price. While DDR333 SDRAM isn't officially available today (the specification isn't complete), when it is first made available it will carry a price premium over DDR266 SDRAM."
    • One thing that puzzles me however... If the DDR333 spec isn't fully complete, what happens when it *is* complete and the chipset isn't 100% compatible ?
    • How I am supposed to take advantage of my N-Forces dual channel DDR. From each test I see on Toms or Anands they always use one stick of memory.

      However, my understanding of the chipset led me to believe I had to use two chips to see any benefit.
      • That's because they aren't using the integrated GF2MX. Using an external graphics card, it really doesn't matter if you have two sticks or one.

      • Just because the testers didn't use two sticks of memory doesn't mean you can't.

        However, you may need to be careful about which two memory slots you're using. Originally, nforce boards would go into "superstability" mode (i.e. slow) if you had memory in any bank other than 1 & 3.

        I know that MSI have since issued a BIOS update that allows all three slots to be used with no performance penalty.

      • Did you actually read [tomshardware.com] those articles?
        Kevin
        • What I am looking for is "proof".

          They keep saying its got great dual channel performance, I haven't found a review comparing two nforce boards where on uses 1 dimm and another uses 2.

          Anyone got one? I want to see if this is a real bandwidth bonus or just some slick advertising. If it were truly as powerful as they state then something must be horribly wrong with 64bit access.

    • Tom's hardware (Score:5, Funny)

      by brer_rabbit ( 195413 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @08:25PM (#3048535) Journal
      I find it amusing how Tom's always reduces things to frames per second in Quake3. As if that's the best measure of performance for any component of a system.

      I imagine in the future, manufacturers, instead of listing [MHz, drive speed, etc], will list modifiers to Quake3 FPS. ie- specs on a system of the future will read like a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet:

      Bob's Machine of 3l33t Gaming
      CPU of giant GHZ: +100 FPS
      Elven Motherboard: +5 FPS
      GPU of Rendering: +80 FPS
      Cursed Hard drive:-15 FPS
      magic DDR memory: +20 FPS
      ISA SB16: -20 FPS
      -----------------
      Save vs Quake3: 170 FPS

  • I will be happy on the day that I don't get a motherboard which repeatedly powers down the system, randomly. (FYI: Yes, I tried Linux, WinME, and WinXP)

    The only chipset (recently) that works for me is the ALi Magik
    • I will be happy on the day that I don't get a motherboard which repeatedly powers down the system, randomly. (FYI: Yes, I tried Linux, WinME, and WinXP)

      The problem's not software, it's hardware. There's a line that goes back to the power supply called "power good" and if it's deasserted then your power supply will shut down. There are other possible reasons, like excess heat. Make sure your power supply is working perfectly and your case's internal cooling is adequate before you assume your mainboard is flaky. I've never observed my ASUS A7M266 have this kind of problem, nor on any other board unless the power supply was inadequate or flaky.

  • More Reviews (Score:3, Informative)

    by brogdon ( 65526 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @07:09PM (#3048198) Homepage
    <karmawhoring>

    There's a bunch of other good reviews of the set in all its forms and splendor.


    Digit-Life [digit-life.com]
    HardOCP [hardocp.com]
    AnandTech [anandtech.com]
    AMDDb [amdmb.com]
    Via Hardware [viahardware.com]


    </karmawhoring>
  • The article was ok, but the testers leave alot to be desired, it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in. The fact that they diddnt bother changing a bios setting to show the potential of the board says something. While some may say that the cas should autoconfigure to spd.. its a simple setting to change. I have a ECS 735 that runs cas2 although I had to manually change it. If you spend the time to get to know your motherboard.. you can usually get all kinds of performance out of it.. Dont just plug it in and expect to beat the benchmarks.
    • They actually said their ECS board wouldn't run stably at CAS 2. In other words, YMMV.

    • it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in.

      Did you read the article or just skip to the conclusion? I quote from the middle of page 4 [tech-report.com]:

      To keep things fair, we tested with the memory timings set as aggressively as possible on each motherboard, so long as the system was stable. Because we were using very high quality memory, using aggressive memory timings generally wasn't a problem. The one exception was the SiS 745, which simply refused to POST if we set the CAS latency to 2, regardless of whether the memory was running at 266MHz or 333MHz. We tried it with several different DDR333 DIMMs, and the ECS 745 board wouldn't POST at CAS 2 with any of them, even with the memory clock set to DDR266. So in the case of the 745 chipset, we had to test at CAS 2.5.

  • Squiggly etch (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pussy Is Money ( 527357 )
    Something that caught my attention in one of the photographs with this article is the funny squiggly PCB lines at the lower left in this image [tech-report.com]. Any hardware people who can enlighten me as to the function of these squiggly lines? Is this a timing device or some design artifact?

    • Re:Squiggly etch (Score:3, Informative)

      by SexPig ( 464304 )
      They're to control timing so that instructions leaving certain areas of the CPU do not hit the bus before others. My friend who use to map PCB boards for a living calls them "speed bumps".
    • I don't think it has anything to do with timing, because at 333 MHz the wavelength of signals is around 1 m.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Squiggly etch (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Clock frequency isn't the issue. Rise and fall times are what drives a board into high speed design rules.

        Clock frequency obviously sets an UPPER limit on the rise and fall times - the total rise and fall must be equal to or less than the one cycle. But most logic signals have edges that are much faster than that.

        Mr. Fourier tells us that the bandwidth of a perfect square wave is infinite. A 333 MHz clock with 333 MHz bandwidth is a sine wave. Extending it out to the next harmonic found in a square wave requires 1 GHz bandwidth, and the signal starts to look vaguely squarish. 3 GHz gets you something that anyone would recognize as a square wave, but with lots of ripple.

        The time/distance relationship to pay attention to is not one cycle, but the rise or fall time. If the travel time is more than the rise or fall, then the trace is a transmission line. If the signal gets to the far end before the rise or fall finish, then you can ignore transmission line effects.
      • This has to do with propagation of the data along the bus. Mainly that when a set of parallell traces goes around a corner, the inner traces are shorter unless the extra zig-zags are added. By equalizing the length of all the traces, then each of the pulses arrives at the end of the line at the same time. Also, even though the wavelength of 333 MHz electro-magnetic radiation in a vacuum is slightly less that one meter, emr travels through pcb materials at much slower speeds, ranging from 1/3 to about 3/4 the speed of light in a vacuum. Furthermore, any transmission line that is longer than one-hundredth of a wavelength (clearly true in this case) needs to have timing effects taken into consideration.

        So to recap, the wiggly traces on the pcb are to ensure proper timing of the signals traveling along the bus, due to a shorter path around the inside of a corner than the outside.
    • Those are probably there for the cpu to north bridge traces - the clocks need a tiny delay so that the data (which is launched at about the same time) meets setup and hold at the far end
    • Could be done to act like a small inductor or something, but that's just a W.A.G. on my part.
  • When SiS735 chipset has been released - it was fastest and - probably - most stable chipset for Athlon. Only one (major) vendor created motherboard with it - ECS k7s5a. Other vendors was selling KT266-based motherboards, much more expensive, slower and just worse (I am not sure, but isn't true that VIA bridge still has problem with SB Live on Windows?).
    I would pay a lot of money for ASUS SiS735-based motherboard, but it just doesn't exist. Why?
    ECS k7s5a is fast and stable. The only problem is that a lot of ECS mobos are defective. I am not sure what should I buy now - Soltek or Asus mobo on KT266A? ECS k7s5a? Wait for something new?

    Are there any Linux benchmark of motherboards? With stuff like kernel compiling time, drm performance, hdparm results, etc...?
  • AMD has a nice dual-bus SMP architecture. Via has the DDR333 RAM. NVidea has the dual-banked DDR266. If we could either of these memory architectures paired up with the dual-bus SMP Athlon systems, then we would have the making of a VERY serious dual-CPU machine.

    Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board. If someone were to make a quad Athlon board with dual-banked DDR333, that would be a SERIOUS piece of iron for the enterprise, and at a very reasonable price. It's too bad that everyone's afraid of stepping on Intel's toes...

    steve
  • While not performing too badly, it's a shame that the SiS chipset doesn't do a little better against the Via offerings... I've got an SiS 735 board, and it's solid as a rock, and blazing fast under Linux 2.4.18-pre9, and I don't have to put up with Via's flakey-ass south bridge chips. Via might be the speed king, but I'm sticking with SiS' 7x5 line for my future purchases. Here's hoping the 755 (or whatever comes next) kicks some Via ass. (or that AMD comes along and makes another decent chipset again, whichever...)
  • I find it interesting how much the price increases per unit of value. Seems the fastest, most impressive motherboards and CPU's out there today only outperform the lesser price by a very small margin, and yet people will shell out big bucks for the latest and greatest.

    My theory is to buy the second-tier of technology. For instance, I just picked up an Athlon XP 1700+, with a ECS K7S5A motherboard, GeForce 2 64 MB card, and lots of extras, for less than $400 with shipping, because I decided it wasn't worth an additional couple hundred to go with a GeForce 4 rather than a 2, etc. Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] is a great place to look.

    And the best part is that I now have a fairly good computer and still have the money to upgrade again in a year or so if I want to.

    Out of curiosity, anyone out here going to buy this top-of-the-line board, and if so, why? (and how do you get so much cash, wanna give me some?) What benefits are there to having the best computer out there vs. the second best? (I'm a poor college student, I'm also slightly curious....)

    • I'm totally happy with trailing-edge technology. Every April I get a new motherboard and whatever new CPU that costs between $70 and $80 dollars.

      Last year I decided I was sick of 3d games, so I got a real cheap $68 ECS K7SEM all-in-one board. I sold the old Voodoo Banshee card, and the old ethernet card, and the old K6-2 CPU on Ebay for about half what I payed for them the previous April. The board has been extremely stable (Linux & KDE) and the display quality is quite surprising. I use a 19" monitor and I have to run 16-bit color, though, to get a decent refresh rate.

      This April, I'll another SiS all-in-one. The new ones use DDR memory and the 315 video gpu so I'm looking forward to running 24-bit color. I'll probably get $40 for the old ECS board and maybe $35 or so for the old 850 Athlon. Not bad for a years worth of computing!

  • What decent Athlon boards exist for SMP?

    • Re:[slightly offtopic] SMP boards? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by syzxys ( 557810 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @07:59PM (#3048433)

      The Tyan Tiger MP [tyan.com] kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).

      Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)

      ---
      NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf! [zappadoodle.com]
      • Good point about the MPX chipset. I've been waiting patiently for the Asus A7M266-D and now that it's out, the USB is busted! Plus the boards I've seen have built-in audio, which I'd actually rather *not* have. And what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in? Looks kludgey. But the PCI USB 2.0 card is supposed to work in the 64-bit slot, no? So maybe 'losing' a PCI slot isn't that bad. I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?

        So the Tyan Tiger MPX was starting to look good, but then I hear the USB card Tyan is shipping is NOT a USB 2.0 card. So now it seems like you're really losing a PCI slot, since there don't seem to be that many 64-bit PCI cards out there now (or you buy a new 64-bit USB card and junk the free one). Built-in LAN sounds great, and the board looks a lot cleaner, especially the standard hard drive power connector by the ATX power connector for more current. Tyan probably learned a lot from their first SMP Athlon boards.

        Anyone else have any experience with SMP Athlons? Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?

          • what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in?

            I haven't seen the one on the A7M266-D, but I remember some older ASUS boards did this as well. In that case, it was some kind of power filter; it was on a daughtercard to keep the motherboard from heating up too much. :-)

          • I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?

            Unfortunately, it depends on the design of the board, but I doubt you'll run into IRQ conflicts on a modern SMP board. All the PCI interrupts end up on PCI INTA-INTD lines, which on SMP boards are routed to the APIC. PCI interrupts are level-triggered (i.e. intrinsically shareable) so most IRQ conflicts are caused by devices on the ISA bus, e.g. parallel ports, serial ports, floppy disk, many sound cards, ISA modems, etc., *except* in cases where the BIOS insists on allocating a separate interrupt for each device. Anyway, I've heard that some OS's show APIC interrupts as INT1-INT24 (so you obviously couldn't possibly have an interrupt conflict), and I know my SMP board hasn't had any interrupt conflict-type problems, so I doubt you'll have any problems, but YMMV.

          • Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?

            I used the MP's, only because I wanted to make sure if something went wrong with the system it *wasn't* going to be the processors. A lot of people use the XP's instead, they seem to work well. I heard a rumor that AMD is going to lock out SMP capabilities on the XP's. I also heard that they're releasing Duron MP's. Isn't the rumor mill fun? :-)

          ---
          Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf! [zappadoodle.com]
          • I've had IRQ problems with my Abit BP6. With all five PCI slots filled (an Adaptec 29160N controller, FireWire card, Soundblaster 128, 3Com NIC and nVidia PCI card) I couldn't get things to work right. I went back to the Voodoo3 AGP (different bus, apparently) and had no problems.

            I guess in theory they should share IRQ's; maybe one of the cards didn't play nice. And with five slots and four lines (INTA-INTD) you know there's going to be some sharing, even if there are 24 APICs... right? Plus there's motherboard USB that shares with one of those slots.

            Thanks for the tips.

  • Upgradeable Chipsets? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Locke_CJ ( 118855 )
    From the article:
    "The pinouts on the KT333's north and south bridge chips follow VIA's V-Map standard, so the KT333 north bridge is obstensibly a drop-in replacement for the KT266 or KT266A. (Heck, it's theroetically pin-compatible with the P4X266A, for whatever that's worth.) Like those chipsets, the KT333 north bridge chip can be paired up with one of several different south bridge chips."

    Which got me to thinking, "Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?"
    Aside from radical revisions, is there any reason why an I/O controller couldn't be swapped out via some sort of socketed interface?

    • Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?

      Wow, that's a good idea. I wonder how the cost of manufacturing for, e.g. a ZIF socket + chip compares to just surface-mounting or whatever the motherboard makers do now. (Although, actually I think at least one of my current motherboards has the southbridge in a socket).

      I see two problems though:

      1. How big of a target market would there be, initially? I mean, sure probably 50% of the people on /. would be in the market, but what about the big OEM's? I don't see "consumers" going to the local CompUSA to upgrade their northbridge, I mean hell, (a) most people don't even know what a "northbridge" is, (b) the CompUSA folks would be more likely to tell them they just needed a new motherboard or new computer. "Oh yeah, your power switch is broken, better upgrade your case, motherboard, and processor while you're at it." :-)
      2. The programming interface to each chipset is proprietary. Ever try to get information about the registers on a VIA chipset? They want you to sign a giant NDA just to look at the specs PDF, for crying out loud! (Although last time I looked, some people had slipped up and posted NDA'd VIA specsheets where google [google.com] could find it. Shh, don't tell anyone. :-) And since it's proprietary, that means the developers are used to being able to change it whenever they want. IOW, there's no engineering pressure to make things backward-compatible, because the only software that is affected is the BIOS. So, you could say, just distribute BIOS images with the new chipsets. But how many tech support calls do you think they're going to get when people accidentally plug in the new chipset with ACPI power off registers are in the same place the DRAM timing registers used to be? (so the board won't power on anymore).

      So in other words, I think it's a great idea, but there's no way the chipset companies are going to have it while they're still acting like it's the 1950's and every single chipset is (a) proprietary, (b) guarded like it's the secret to eternal life or something. Oh well, we can always dream. :-)

      ---
      NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf! [zappadoodle.com]

      • To point #1, it would depend completely on the cost of using some sort of socket interface instead of surface mounting the part, and as I see it, would be the option of the motherboard manufacturers, so then any additional costs could be passed directly onto the consumers. If you want that extra feature, you pay X amount more for it.

        On point #2, something like this could be implemented without losing "intellectual property" in the process. NVidia, SiS, VIA, etc. could create their own interface and develop chips for that interface, separte from the others. So, for a VIA 7xx series motherboard, you have interchangeable I/O controllers. If you get a 8xx series board, there's a completely different pin array, as there would be in a SiS board. It would be much like Socket 370 vs. 426(?) vs. Slot 1,2,A and so on. This cuts down on the possibility of parts that fit but match up incorrectly.
        Thanks for your comments, I agree with your take on it, I just wanted to keep the conversation moving.

    • People have been trying to do that, but the effort required for an architecture that can work even as little as five years into the feature simply does not afford it (yet). Look at how expensive SCSI is, for example: this cost is a direct result of its forward-looking and comprehensive design.

      Modularity comes at a cost, compatibility comes at a cost. Although we are taught the virtues of modularity in the classroom (and can of course see for ourselves how modularity is beneficial), those of us who proceed to actually build things quickly get to appreciate the subtle (and not so subtle) drawbacks as well, in the form of added complexity on virtually every level. Just imagine a five year old architecture so flexible that it can take advantage of PC133 RAM today -- the cost would be entirely prohibitive, and there are so many parts that you would need to replace that you are better off having someone else do it for you -- which it basically how things work right now.

  • Compare those results with what was there a year ago [anandtech.com].
    I had ALi Magic1 board for almoust a year and I'm quite happy with it (I run Linux 24/7 on it). I recently bought VIA266A board for another computer. Good stability, more features (on-board NIC, 6-channel sound, AGPpro, on-board IDE RAID), perfomance gains still look marginal to me though.
  • Socket-A Chipset Roundup

    Roundups happen at the end. The end of what? Is CmdrTaco trying to tell us something?

  • Sounds like a cool carnival game... with the big oversize mallet and all, right?

  • What is needed is a Stability Report... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Optimizer ( 14168 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @01:03AM (#3049534)
    After assembling a new system consisting of an Antec case, Soyo Dragon Plus motheboard, 1GB Corsair DDR RAM, XP 1800+ CPU, 64MB GeForce 2 Ti, Sound Blaster Audigy, Yamaha CD-RW and Adaptec 2930 SCSI card (Notice the lack of cheap components), I've discovered that the VIA chipsets and Nvidia videocards have a history of not getting along, with all fingers pointing at the KT266A chipset.

    Running Win2K Pro (fully updated), and the latest BIOS and drivers for everything, and not overclocking a darn thing, I'm still suffering random system lockups doing simple activites such as broswing the web. Games are too tempermental to seriously play. (It was really bad before I uninstalled the latest MS win2K rollup update - click on any browser link and have a 15% chance of the system hanging...)

    I bought the Dragon Plus Motherboard based on all the wonderful online reviews of the board and chipset. Not one said anything about the lack of stability with the KT266A chipset, or any problems with lockups. Later, doing some google searching turned up message boards full of other people experiencing the exact same problems. The only "solution" discovered (and even recommended on the Soyo web site) is to drop the RAM/Bus speed to 100Mhz from 133Mhz. That kind of defeats the purpose of making a fast machine...

    Now I'm trying to research a motherboard replacment (which means resintalling the OS and most software - shoot an afternoon there) based on stability first, then performance. I'm thinking nForce, but we'll see...

    It's a shame to waste the money on motherboard I'm going to throw out, but there wasn't a warning to be found when I did my initial research. (Note to self: Use google more for these kinds of things)

    -Matt
    • You got that right. My dad bought the regular Dragon board, 512 megs PC2100 DDR Ram, the Athlon 1.4ghz, and a 430 watt PS. He has had nothing but problems. He first had an Abit with the KT133 chipset and things didn't work out so he got a new cpu, new ram, and the Dragon board. Things got worse. He gets random lockups like you do and most of the time now the system won't even boot up. It will lock up on the BIOS SCREEN. It also locks up in scandisk, web browsing, you name it. Win98 was on his system and I put XP Pro on it and it just didn't do a bit of good. He has an ATI AiW Radeon by the way and he still has these problems so it's not related to the video card. It's the damn VIA chipset (a VIA chipset was in the ABit board he got initailly coincidentally). he has spent 6 months and $800 trying to get it all working. Lately I read of the 100mhz "fix" and after doing that in the BIOS and rebooting the system woudln't even turn the monitor on anymore. I gave up. He is in the process of looking for a new board.

      He doesn't know where he went wrong b/c like you he bought it b/c of the awards and rave reviews it got and yet he has had nothing but trouble.
      • Here I am, a rather indifferent assembler of PC's, but I have to think: these problems sound the problems I used to have when my box overheated.

        You have the latest and greatest everything with 400+ ps's... lots of heat there. Mayhap something simple, like say, a spot on the mobo is heating more than others, and causing these problems.

        In the olden days (3 years ago) I'd have taken the cover off the box, and directed a commerical box fan on the assembly. But that can't work anymore -- the air must circulate just so...

        Well, I can listen and learn. No dragon boards for my next box.
        • A quick rundown of the steps taken:

          The CPU was boxed, and the approved heatsink has been checked for attachment.

          The case has 3x 80mm fans in it, plus a chip fan on the mother board. Other chips (video card, etc) have heat sinks. There is also a slim fan/heat sink attached to the bottom of the hard drive.

          Internally, Round cabes are used for all interconnects for maximal airflow in the case.

          The PCI cards are spaced out to insure a empty card slot on each side of every card.

          I've monitored the the CPU and case with the onboard temperature sensors/utility and the chassis tempuratue stabilizes at about 38 degrees centigrade, while the CPU stabilizes at about 46 degrees, unless I'm running a 3d intensive game, then it heats up to about 52 degrees.

          The lockups have occured when the system is warm or cold; and the only things that have caused their frequency to changs has been when drivers/patches have been applied.

          The idea that one spot on the motherboard is too hot is interesting.... but once you read the steps I've taken to keep the system cool, then you'll probably agree that if such a thing is happening, then it is a design flaw in the motherboard layout which should be a problem with all examples of that motherboard.

          Also, with the lockups occuring at times when the system hasn't been given a chance to warm up, that suggests that overheating is the wrong culprit to look at.

          -Matt
        • My dad has left the cover off of his case for over 3 months now because he has been working with it so it has been getting an air flow into the case. And as the OP mentioned in his response to this mesg, my Dad has also said that he experiences these issues within just a few seconds of turning the machine on. The last time I messed with it was this past weekend and I the first boot got into XP just fine. I was there less than 2 min. I then rebooted and entered the BIOS and changed a few settings. The next reboot didn't complete. In fact I never got the initial BIOS sscreen to appear before the system locked up. It's definitely not a heat issue.

          You have to play games with it just to enter the BIOS sometimes as well which is ridiculous and uncalled for. If you don't hit Del at the right time you get a black screen with a blue bar at the bottom and all you can do is reboot again. It is pathetic.
    • I just put together a system with near identical components (Only 512 MB DDR RAM), but I have not had any problems with any sort of conflict. I'm running Windows XP, and I haven't had any random lock ups or anything. I wonder why I haven't, but you have? Interesting. Are you sure the system is being cooled well enough?
    • Made sure the AGP driving value is set right?

      I had graphics freezing problems until I tweaked that setting, and got rid of some slow RAM in favor of some CAS2 Century stuff.
    • Actually it's probably your Nvidia drivers. The 23.11 drivers, which are the latest, are INCREDIBLY unstable. I recommend either downgrading or upgrading to a beta drive i.e. 27.20 which is much more stable. I have a kt266a and have absolutely no problems except for once in a while when crappy Nvidia drivers come out. If you check the message on crash you will notice it is your display driver, and this is not the kt266a's fault.
      • Actually it's probably your Nvidia drivers. The 23.11 drivers, which are the latest, are INCREDIBLY unstable.

        Interesting.. When I first saw this post I was at work. I could swear I had the 23.12 drivers installed at home, but checking the Nvidia site indeed 23.11 was the latest.

        Well, I checked when I got home and I do have the 23.12 drivers. I got them through Windows Update about 3 weeks ago.

        I'm very suprised that Windows Update, which typically has older drivers, actually has something newer than what's on the Nvidia site. Very strange. Nonetheless, the 23.12 drivers are working out pretty well for me (though 23.11 wasn't that problematic for me, it does seem better).

        So if running windows, try windows update, it helped for me (I'm running XP pro with a GF3 TI 200).

    • My Via KT266A beast is VERY stable. I have an Epox 8KHA+ with 256MB of PC2100 and a 1600XP+ Athlon. I run Slackware only. I am thinking about re-installing Windows to play Black & White, but I can't comment on Windows stability at the moment. Linux stability seems very good. It only ever crashes with a cvs DRI X server for my Radeon - I haven't crashed xfree86-4.2.0 yet with this system. And I also tried with the CPU overclocked and reporting as a 1800XP+ Athlon. This was stable but it made me feel a little nervous so I clocked it back again.
      Are you sure it's Via's fault?
  • The biggest problem with Athlon right now is Via. Their chipsets suck. Its practically impossible to get a combination of motherboard, drivers, video card, and video drivers to be happy. The chips + drives are just too unstable.

    I built a machine on the ASUS A7M266 last August and have seen problem after problem. From what I can tell, it is solely due to the Via stuff.

    I am seriously considering rebuilding to machine to use NVIDIA, but I am afraid they are also unproven. Who knows if I will trade one instability for another?

    I really wish AMD would get with the program and encourage quality chipset development like Intel does. There is a reason Intel chips are so much more stable - it'd because Intel cares about the chipset market. I wish we could say the same for AMD.
    • Good to see you having problems with the A7M266 that you can tell are related to Via when that motherboard is based on an AMD chipset:

      http://usa.asus.com/mb/socketa/a7m266/overview.h tm

      As you can see it's based on the AMD 761 chipset... and as you probably heard, they're quite stable (And PCI bug free)

      Maybe that's your problem... the 761 chipset felt offended because you called it a Via :D

    • I really wish AMD would get with the program and encourage quality chipset development like Intel does. There is a reason Intel chips are so much more stable - it'd because Intel cares about the chipset market. I wish we could say the same for AMD.

      Ah! But AMD yesterday announced their new 8000 series chipset devices for HyperTransport systems (i.e., Hammer initially and MIPS).

      This new chipset includes the 8111 hub (a traditional southbridge (USB2, 6-channel audio, ATA133, Network, PCI, etc - similar to the nForce MCP it appears) with 800MB/s uplink via HT), the 8131 tunnel (a dual PCI-X controller with 6.4GB/s uplink and 3.2GB/s downlink) and the 8151 tunnel (an AGP 8x controller with 6.4GB/s uplink and 1.6GB/s downlink).

      There are documents on AMDs website (both the press release and the technical details), and a couple of good discussions on AcesHardware forum (http://www.aceshardware.com/forum).

      You can chain the devices like this:

      [CPU][PCI-X][AGP][IO]

      Remember the memory controller for the Hammer is on the processor itself, so there is not a traditional northbridge with memory controller on it anymore.

      • Second try:

        [CPU]<--6.4GBps-->[PCI-X]<--3.2GBps--> [AGP]<--0.8GBps-->[IO]

        Or you can have:

        [CPU]<--6.4GBps-->[PCI-X]
        |
        | (6.4GBps HT CPU interconnect)
        |
        [CPU]<--6.4GBps-->[AGP]<--0.8GBps-->[I O]

        You could even have (the graphics designer dream):

        [CPU]<--6.4GBps-->[PCI-X]<--3.2GBps--> [AGP1]
        |
        | (6.4GBps HT CPU interconnect)
        |
        [CPU]<--6.4GBps-->[AGP2]<--0.8GBps-->[ IO]

        HT enabled SCSI controllers, GigE and 10GigE NICs, etc, will also appear and will be used on HyperTransport based server motherboards.

  • Hmmm... I'm still looking for a good Socket A board, I'll keep an eye on the 333. I've had a few problems but have been mainly satsified by the stability of the KT133A boards, though they are a little out of date.

    As to ECS and the K7S5A, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-meter cattle-prod. I ordered two right after they came out, and they promptly Bit The Big Green Banana of Death shortly after startup, taking a pair of out-of-warranty Athlon 1.4's with them.

    ECS's response was, basically, "too bad so sad." The retailer finally (after 3 months) refunded the cost of the boards (or claimed they have, the money hasn't arrived yet), but I got to eat the cost of two Athlons.

    I am one of literally thousands who have had serious problems with these boards. If you haven't, more power to you and I hope your boards stay healthy.

    As for me, ECS = shoveling cash into the fireplace.

    (And no, I wasn't overclocking them or running them off power from a car battery or anything terminally stupid like that.)

  • I can easily comment on this, as I just got my AthlonXP 1600+ in yesterday and dropped it in to my brand new Abit NV7m which has the built on GeForce 2 and the Nvidia motherboard chip.

    A friend of mine had a kt133a chip with his athlon and he had the problems of SB Live + kt133 not working all the time. This motivated me to go out on a limb and try the nvidia route.

    For anyone who has been holding off on upgrades for a while like I did though, the purchase of the NV7m with the built on Geforce 2 (running at 6x agp!! according to abit) was a nice upgrade from my withering Voodoo 3 3k. $140ish + s&h for vid card and MB isn't bad since the competition is about the same price. I'm still installing stuff to test the on board video card. I was surprised not many hardware sites reviewed it, and there's very little (in english) on Deja-Google about the nv7m good or bad.

    Of special note on this, the motherboard Geforce 2 on the abit board only has Win 2k and Win XP drivers, which sucked, because I wasn't ready to abandon 98SE yet as my gaming machine. Oh well, it was time. :-)

    G

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