nForce 3 150 vs. VIA K8T800

[Peter Wemm]

On Friday 19 November 2004 12:54 pm, David G. Lawrence wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, David G. Lawrence wrote:
> > > So, given a choice between an AMD64 motherboard with nVidia
> > > nForce 3 150 chipset or VIA K8T800 chipset, which one actually
> > > works and what are the tradeoffs?
> >
> > well I had a Gigabyte G-K8NS with a socket 754 and nForce 3 250
> > chipset but switched to a ASUS A8V delux socket 939 with a chipset
> > VIA K8T800 and the latter is better as well more things seem to
> > work with less down sides. I think the latter is much better with
> > the dual channel memory and runs faster. But then again this is
> > only my recent experience with AMD64.
>
>    I recall some folks were recently having stability problems with
> one of the VIA chipsets - any idea which chipset that was?
>
> -DG

We have lots of problems on all of the nForce3-150 chipset based boards 
that I've tried.  I think most of the fault lies with the reference 
bios being lousy, but even if you hack around the bios, all sorts of 
strange things happen, especially with apic enabled.   I really don't 
know who's at fault here.  I would not rule out a freebsd bug or 
misunderstanding somewhere.

I personally have had no problems with via chipset boards.  Except for 
stupid reference bioses that have a MBR partition type whitelist and 
disable the usb keyboard for partition types that they don't recognize 
as being usb keyboard safe...  It is really annoying..  In boot0 and 
boot1 [which are entirely int 10 bios based] the bios reports no 
keyboard events.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5