Hi,

On 1 Jan 2002 at 15:17, Richard Rauch wrote:
> (Sorry for not getting back to you for a couple of days.  I should
> probably add to my .signature, ``Please CC directly to me if replying
> to me on a mailing list.''  (^&)

Others do not like to get messages twice ;).

> It's true that my system isn't under heavy load.  (Is that CPU load,
> or I/O load---or both or either?)

For the specific problem any intensive PCI usage should show the 
effects.

> Still, my observed problems at this point are performance, not
> integrity. It seems unwise to update anything on the motherboard
> unless I'm updating to something that is believed to be rock
> solid---or unless integrity problems manifest themselves.

After all that was reported you (if you really want to risk it) can 
put two drives into the box and move large amounts of data from one 
to the other. However there were several reports of problematic 
behavior of VIA based computers and I cannot say for shure if there 
is only one problem or several problems. If everything else (like 
cabling problems and such) has been found to be correct, and there 
are no traces to incompatibilities (there were reports of several 
drives that have problems synchronising correctly with some 
controllers) then it should be a chipset problem. In general I would 
not put the terms "rock solid" and "X86" together ;).

> Thanks for the pointer to the AMD760 chipset, though.

Actually I have seen not enough reports about the performance of this 
chipset, the data looks good, but you can never tell.

mike