On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 06:24:22PM +0000, Jack Morgan wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 07:55:17AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > >
> > > http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/MS6378L_2a.htm
> > >
> > > which features VIA bridge chips, namely the VIA KLE133 VT8361A chipset
> > > (North-Bridge 510 BGA) and the VIA 686B chipset (South-Bridge 352 BGA).
> > >
> > > Does anyone have this motherboard operating reliably at present? (with
> > > NetBSD 1.5.2) If so, are there any limitations or gotchas?
> > 
> > it is possible that this particular thing will work stable with you type
> > of load. but in general avoid VIA based products as much as possible.
> 
> Why is that? My MSI KT7 Turbo2 VIA KT133A (VT8363A/VT82C686B) is running 
> well under 1.5.3_ALPHA. I haven't got around to getting the AC97 Audio
> working but shouldn't be a problem as it was working under Linux. 

For what it's worth, the majority of the approximately 50 NetBSD 
workstations and servers at Stevens Tech, where I used to work, have VIA
chipsets, and they seem to work fine.  We *never* saw any of the various
problems others have reported.  On the other hand, we do very carefully
choose and qualify "whole box" configurations and avoid really cheap parts
whenever possible.

The worst we've been burned is by ASUS motherboards with the very good
AMD 760 chipset but crappy board design -- they don't work reliably with
ECC turned on, which is a real pain for us.  Also, we got some SiS 735
motherboards that were quite nice but didn't run NetBSD *or* Windows
for long unless they had the very latest BIOS -- and about 10 motherboards
all came with *completely different* BIOS revisions.  Sigh.

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud