Nforce & Via

L

lee63

Gawd
Joined
Jul 4, 2005
Messages
657
How is Nforce 4 chipsets better than the latest Via chipset? Would I improve gaming performance if I got a nforce4 board? and if so which one? Im not into OCing
Thanx in advance
 
In all honesty VIA boards are ok if you don't plan on OC'ing too much. NF4's give you the ability to get very high overclocks especially the DFI's. MSI's, and Asus OC's ok.
 
Vote: NForce

Past experience with VIA chipset = HORRIBLE. Nothing but driver problems. I haven't used a VIA chipset since my Xp 1600+ Only the other day (1 month ago...) I was trying to update that old computer and the audio driver subsystem wasn't working. Took me an entire day to find my way through via's chipset page! After finding them, they not only didn't want to work but they felt intent on causing me much frustration. I finally got it working though. /Story.

Conclusion: I am not a Fan of VIA Chipsets. However, like I said ^^ above, it was based on past experience. No clue how they are now.
 
VIA has actually smoothed out quite well. The early VIA woes were IRQ, ACPI, and latency issues related (thus many had issues with add-in cards and most especially creative cound cards with older KT133-133a-266-266a boards). George Breese's latency patch helped some, and knowing how to manually assign IRQ's halped others. K8 VIA boartds are fast, and not nearly as trouble ladden. But i agree with your NF4 vote :)
 
So is it worth switching over to an Nforce board, or just wait for socket M2 to come out?
 
I just got fed up with my NVidia board, socket 754 Asus K8Ee-deluxe, NForce 3 250 GB chipset, and got a VIA based board instead.

Best move I made. Under FreeBSD the driver support outright sucks, under Linux it is questionable and under Windoze, well, where to get started. The Windoze drivers would from time to time forget the SATA ports (I should probably have installed the Asus drivers but I got fed up and sold the board) and I had unexplained stuttering in games that went away when switching to the Via board. I could go on for a long time.

Now, I was unlucky to get the Abit KV8-pro for a K8T800 board. This particular board has the thermal zones not connected to the Winbond chip they already have on board, but in a custom design for "uGuru". F... U. That chip doesn't have any developers documentation and is hence unsupported in all but Windoze. That would be nice enough for a gamer but alas, apparently you can read the temps in Windoze only in their crappy intrusing home-grown utility. The GbE is also only capable of about 60 MB/sec, the NVidia non-PCI part rocked, I have to say that much.

Anyway, no problems with the actual Via parts. I will get a different VIA board (probably Asus K8V-X) and be happy.
 
Wow mixed opinions here, I thought everybody would say go with an Nforce board. Is like a ATI & Nvidia thing? :eek:
 
I would never buy a VIA Chipset ever again.

But since you already have it, I wouldnt buy a whole new Motherboard just for an NForce chipset... just next time know what you are doing and dont go Via :cool:
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
I would never buy a VIA Chipset ever again.

But since you already have it, I wouldnt buy a whole new Motherboard just for an NForce chipset... just next time know what you are doing and dont go Via :cool:
Click to expand...
Thanx that was the answer I was looking for. It will be hard not to replace it though especially when I have the money.Will I se better proformance with a Nforce board?
 
lee63 said:
Thanx that was the answer I was looking for. It will be hard not to replace it though especially when I have the money.Will I se better proformance with a Nforce board?
Click to expand...
I would say its nothing you will notice unless all you do all day is run 3dmark and sandra and compare Benchmark numbers all day.

Performance was never really Vias problem, it was stability. If you dont have frequent crashes and lock ups etc... then i wouldnt worry about it.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
I would say its nothing you will notice unless all you do all day is run 3dmark and sandra and compare Benchmark numbers all day.

Performance was never really Vias problem, it was stability. If you dont have frequent crashes and lock ups etc... then i wouldnt worry about it.
Click to expand...
Yea, all I do is game with it, your right, I will keep it for now. Thanx for your help and quick responce
:D
 
As a note, I've had the exact opposite issue with Nforce and VIA chipsets; we have been using VIA boards at work (where I maintain several computer labs) and have had a signficantly smaller number of VIA boards fail in comparison to Nf4 boards; say every year I have 1-2% of my VIA mobos have issues, whereas I tend to have between a 5-7% failure rate per year with the nforce boards. We had so many issues with the NF3 line that we just sent them all back to our supplier and replaced them with VIA chipsets.

If you want a stupid high OC, go with NF chipsets. If you want incredibly stable boards, then I'd recommend a VIA board. As a note, this doesn't necessarily mean that the NF boards are unstable, but my experiences indicate that, on a whole, the VIA boards are less of a hassle to deal with.

 
go nForce...I have a VIA and I am not happy with it...I can OC my CPU to 2.6 fine and it can Prime95 for hours, but as soon as I play a game...I get the "nv4_disp has been caught in an infinite loop" error. I can't fix it at all. As long as I leave my FSB at 255 I can play games fine. I need to try a different card, or an ATI card and see if it works.
 
i had problems with my via board and HDA Mystic sound card.... switch to an nforce 3 250 and all is perfect...

i always had problems with sound cards and via
 
well i have recently built a a8v-deluxe and i have a a8n-sli and a dfi-lanparty ultra d.

just built the a8v because i needed a MB with a AGP port for a 6800gt i had laying around.


anyways the a8v deluxe is a pretty decent MB and it seems stable--haven't had any problems with it gamming or otherwise and it can overclock some --after the bios flash to 1014-beta the mb is a bit better-- esp with the venice core i put in there.

but it is not in the same league as the a8n-sli deluxe of the dfi lanparty ultra d--overclocking or otherwise .

sure a flakey nf4 is not as good as a good via-- but a good nf4 is better than a good via

i prefer the nf4 mb's and there isn't much economy in building a all new system for agp.

however if you want a agp and 5 pci's--because you allready have a agp card--well then it makes sence to get one.


new builds though--nf4 the way to go. :cool:
 
Have they fixed the 1T command issue with the A8V? I've been reading viarena forums and mostly bad things. Seems like the last best bios was 1009. What's the best, yet stable bios now for it? I've got a 3200+ venice at 2.4ghz(haven't pushed it farther yet, breaking in AS5 with XP-90) and was hoping to utilize 1T eventually. Other than that, haven't had any problems with this board.

Even my audigy 2 card works with no problems.
 
lee63 said:
Wow mixed opinions here, I thought everybody would say go with an Nforce board. Is like a ATI & Nvidia thing? :eek:
Click to expand...

Not really. I love NVidia video cards (and bash ATI where I can) but I don't recommend their chipsets.

I should qualify my Via recommendations with a few more statements:

1) I don't overclock

2) yes, the throughput on the GbE on the NForce3 250 GB was awesome. The Via stuff doesn't even reach full GbE speed even when the rest of the system is idle

3) I used to avoid Via like the plague, my Socket A motherboard had a few issues, it was Kt400 or KT600, don't remember

However, from what I can see Via did their homework and the Athlon 64/Opteron series of chipsets actually work fine, at least for non-overclockers like me.

I wonder how many people who dislike Via in this thread base their opinions on older generations of Via chipsets. While I certainly realize that not everybody can update their opinions with every new generations I ask you to take my word for Via's improvements lately.

In the past I also couldn't use Via because I always want ECC memory. With the Athlon 64 this is not dependent on the chipset anymore, so Via doesn't get in the way, and socket 940 demands ECC anyway, so no problem there either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top