> >VIA chipsets have ISA (no matter onboard or with slots) handling
> >completely broken. 1/2 of sound cards, 3/4 of multiserial cards doesn't
> >work.
>
> Not surprising.  This was a built-in serial port.
yes - everything on isa bus

> >> * The Abit VP6 says it supports ECC, but it doesn't.  VIA chipset.
>
> >VIA doesn't say. it's Abit's lie
>
> Abit's specs imply that they copied the whole segment from VIA docs.
hmm...
> >anyway Intel CPU's are faster in terms of bus throughput. which is often
> >more important in unix.
>
> I haven't got any useful benchmarks to compare with, yet.  In practice, I

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=16m count=256

bs must be so large to not measure cache but main memory throughput.

> haven't had a machine not be fast enough in years; speed isn't a big issue
> for me.  Stability is.

yes. in fact there are now no slow machines (or there are no fast if you
use windows XP ;)), but there are better or worse quality