On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 02:06:54PM +0200, Frank van der Linden wrote:
> Btw, for people who are hesitant to buy an Athlon board with the
> VIA K*133 chipset, I noticed that, for example, Asus now has
> boards with a 266Mhz FSB featuring ALI, SiS and AMD 761 chipsets.

The SiS can run the CPU bus at 266 but doesn't support DDR SDRAM. :-(

The ALi has a reputation for dreadful performance.

The VIA only does about 10% better than their SDRAM chipset on memory
bandwidth benchmarks.

The AMD seems to be the way to go.  I have the ASUS AMD761-based board
with a 1.3GHz processor, 512MB of DDR memory, and four UDMA/100 disks.
(Two disks are on a Promise card).  I've had no IDE problems even
though the southbridge is a VIA 686B (I don't know of any actual
production board with the AMD southbridge on it :-( ).  The board works
GREAT -- I get 90MB/sec of disk throughput (clearly, the problems I had
with PCI bus contention with other chipsets are gone -- beats me how!)
and huge memory bandwidth.  I can build XFree 4 from scratch in about
half an hour.

The SiS chipset is interesting because it's really highly integrated
and it's dirt-cheap.  It's a single IC with video, disk, and ether
interfaces included.  Unfortunately XFree doesn't support the video
yet and the ether is probably the fairly low-performance "sip".

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
    And now he couldn't remember when this passion had flown, leaving him so
  foolish and bewildered and astray: can any man?
						   William Styron