On Monday 24 December 2001 01:24, you wrote:
> Because most of the AMD-friendly motherboards have VIA chipsets.
>
> What's wrong with those?  How shall I count the ways:
> * I have one motherboard that will, every couple of months, lose the
> ability to see hard drives after a boot, until it's been powered down for
> at least two hours.  VIA chipset.
> * I had (I returned it) a motherboard where NetBSD would, 100% reliably,
>   see the first key you pressed after boot as held down indefinitely until
>   you unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in.  VIA chipset.
>  * I used to have a motherboard that couldn't even boot with a 5GB
> drive installed, no matter what it was jumpered as, or how you set the BIOS
> up. VIA chipset.

I've had simlar exprenced with Intel boards, I can add NIC refusing to 
transmit data worked in any other mobo, PCI graphics was always corrupted 
(AGP worked fine) when I accessed the HD, DIMMS not working that worked in 
all other mobos, HDs systmaticly redcuing by 1 cyclender every boot.

I don't use intel cause I can't get the power, a 2ghz P4 doesn't come close 
to a 700Mhz CPU for my work & the P-III's are I/O bound much more agresivly 
by their bus to compete with Athlons.


> Now, to be fair, the i810 and i815 chipsets don't support ECC - but they
> somehow seem to have avoided the problem where vendors go around claiming
> they do.

Yeah I agree, VIA pulled the plug on ECC support late in development as far 
as I can tell & th KT133(A) boards were a nightmare, besides a few boards 
(ie. iWill KK-266plus-R), but the 266(A)'s are good chipsets, the only 
problem I've had is PCI latency issues with the budget board boys, but my K7R 
& KT266(A) Asus boards don't have problems like that.

> While we're at it, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish devoutly that
> I could find a board with a ServerWorks chipset that did Athlons. 

I agree I've got a HE-SL based machine, what can I say it works very well... 
it's that simple, it's the only mobo I have 100% confidence in, but even as a 
dualy it's not got the power *sigh* tis still too I/O bound to keep pace with 
a 1.4Ghz Athlon :(

Ani