Aevum Heres the thing, i remember VIA being the plague when the K7 was around.



The KT133 and KT266 ram issues.

Aevum the 686B southbridge with UDMA mode issues and problems when tried to transfer more then 1GB from 1 drive to another.

Aevum via chipsets gave good performance, but at the cost of stability and issue after issue, after a while everyone who could afford to would escape to the AMD 760 chipset and those who couldnt would go for the Sis 756FX and 758 chipsters,

There's no such thing. I collect x86 hardware since 1998, and I've never encountered or read about this supposed ram issue the KT133 and KT266 suffer from. VIA chipsets are the best thing to happen to the socket A platform since sliced bread, and they had some great chipsets for super socket 7 (AMD K6-II/K6-III) as well, with no real competition - namely the VIA MVP3 and MVP4. On socket 370 they offered AGP 4x, ATA100 and great overclocking support at a much more competitive price then intel's own chipsets, and the Apollo Pro 133 had superior AGP performance when compared to the intel 815.This issue you speak of only affected early pentium 4 chipsets, as the P4M266/P4X266 did indeed have memory related stability issues, but only when using more then 768MB of ram, and using that much memory was very uncommon in 2001.This issue (data corruption when transferring a file larger then 1GB from one partition to another - not more then 1gb of data from one drive to another) occurs only on early motherboards equipped with the VT82C686B. It's not really the controller's fault, but in fact a PCI latency issue. This issue has plagued select VIA chipsets from 00-01 and affected not only the HDD controller built into the SB, but addon cards as well, especially PCI sound cards and Gigabit LAN cards. There are BIOS updates and software patches available to fix this problem.VIA got a bad name in the Pentium II/III era when loads of cheap no-name slot 1 motherboards flooded the US (and europe to a lesser extent), and consumers unknowingly bought their fill. The problem there is not the chipset (VIA Apollo) but the poor quality and design of these cheap boards witch would be unstable to varying degrees (from unusable to tolerable). Slot 1 VIA boards from ABIT, Soltek and Asus will give any i440 board a run for it's money, and were cheaper. Vendors like PC-Chips, Matsonic, Jetway and so on released the aforementioned cheap and unstable slot 1 boards, and are the cause of the rumor. This can be also coupled with intel's anti competitive practices, where they would give large OEM's like Asus and Abit huge discounts to postpone the release of boards running competing chipsets, and release those in limited supply.If you have the time and hardware you can see for yourself. Just go on ebay and buy the first PC-Chips/Matsonic/Jetway slot 1 VIA board you find, and try to build a machine around it. Then do the same with a proper VIA board like the Abit VA6 or Asus P3V4, and compare performance with an Intel 440 equipped motherboard. You will be pleasantly surprised.There were some other issues as well. The aforementioned PCI latency bug, and poor chipset support in nvidia Forceware and Detonator video card drivers. There are some Detonator versions witch will cause BSODs on via chipsets under win98, but work fine on intel chipset boards.Throughout my IT career and years of collecting hardware, I've only come across socket A SiS chipset boards inside cheap pre-buit machines with everything on board and usually no AGP slot. Performance and stability of these systems was abysmal. SiS did make good socket A chipsets but were too late to release them, and their reputation was already soiled by the plethora of aforementioned budget machines that flooded the low-end market. VIA was already offering the excellent KT400 by the time SiS pulled their shit together and released a stable / fast FSB200/DDR400 cabable socket A chipset - and guess what - they were still used in budget rigs - even tough this time around SiS had a winning product.Same story with Super Socket 7 - SiS was late to the party, and most machines were using the MVP3 chipset from VIA.AMD 760 boards are a rarity in eastern europe. I've only seen one, and that is the FIC AD11 in my collection. An excellent early DDR board, but from what I remember AMD chipset motherboards were nearly double the price of their VIA counterparts, so they sold really poorly. There was no motivation to buy one either, since you could get the same level of performance / features / stability from an equivalent VIA chipset board, and use the rest of the cash for more ram or a faster video card - witch is what most people did.