VIa is a chipset..usually used on cheap low end boards because it's cheap to manufacture and is therefore a good option for cheap end systems...
You didn't need to sift through hundreds of pages to find that out. VIA are the first 3 google results! Anyway. It isn't really a performance board, you'll probably find your school computers have em or little offices / shops. I know my school did Well, the media/tech drawing had intel but business got VIA and celery.
The Via forum is here because Via were once a huge manufacturer. In the late PIII era, Intel's chipset offerings were pathetic. The i810 had no AGP support, the i815 didn't support much RAM and couldn't use ISA slots, and the only 'decent' Intel chipset, the i440BX, was getting quite old. Via's chipsets were often about as quick as the i440BX but with support for all the fancy new features found on the i815. Therefore Via was very important. This continued in the P4 era because Intel initially insisted on using ridiculously expensive RDRAM. Via produced SDRAM and DDR SDRAM chipsets which made P4s much more affordable until Intel finally saw sense and made their own SDR/DDR chipsets. Similarly, for the first few years of the Athlon's life, the AMD chipsets were not really very good. They didn't have many features, they didn't overclock well, and they weren't all that quick. Via took over that market with the KT133/KT266/KT333/KT400, and only really lost it when Nvidia released the Nforce2. Overall, Via were previously one of the most important manufacturers around. Now they tend to just make low-power PCs (which generally get discussed in the SFF forum) and low-end chipsets (which get discussed in AMD Hardware or What/Where to Buy). That said, there are still good reasons to buy Via hardware. Unlike any other manufacturer, they provide Windows 98SE drivers for almost all their hardware - so if you're building a PC for software which requires Windows 98 (often software which is used to control things like CNC machines, and therefore absolutely not replaceable) then Via's a great option. They're also fairly innovative. At the moment, the PT880 Ultra chipset is fairly popular because it supports AGP and DDR1 RAM as well as PCIe and DDR2 RAM. This means that for people upgrading an old system to a Core 2 Duo, boards like Asrock's 4CoreDual-VSTA (based on the PT880) are a great option - they can use the DDR RAM and AGP video card from the old system but keep the upgrade options of DDR2 and PCIe.
It should be mentioned that Via's range of low powered processors and chipsets have interesting non mainstream features on board, for example an encryption/decryption engine and mpeg2 decoding (which is/was rare on low end graphics cards up until recently) which is fantastic for ultramini pcs
the problem with that is that youre crippling a core 2 duo with an AGP graphics card and DDR1 memory...oh and youre stuck with a VIA chipset. nice thought though. and of course, yet another very informative and interesting post from SLATYE
It's a great idea for people who like to upgrade in small stages, because they can't see themselves saving for a whole new mobo/cpu/ram/video.
Yes, it's certainly not ideal - but not actually all that bad. When Anandtech tested it, the 775Dual-VSTA was doing an amazingly good job at keeping up with the much more expensive Intel chipsets. Core 2 Duos don't care all that much about RAM bandwidth, and AGP8x is still more than adequate for video cards up to around the 8600GT mark. If you can afford an 8800 series card, you should be able to afford a better mainboard and new RAM anyway.
the via chipset came nowhere near the i440bx in terms of speed, compatibility and reliability.. the quotes around 'decent' imply that you beleive the i440bx wasnt that good
i'd agree with everything said here, however i have generally found VIA chipsets to sacrifice stability for speed/cost more often than not and as such i would not recommend them - this was especially true for A64, socket a and Pentium 3/4 with some of the absolute worst boards ever being VIA based.
Me too, although Nforce2 was freaking awesome (and is the reason i will keep an Nforce2 rig forever. Abit NF7-S FTW!)
I fully agree with you on the A64 part - but for the others, Via played a pretty important role. With the PIII, they provided very reasonable alternatives to the i815 series of chipsets. With the Socket A Athlons they provided some great alternatives to the AMD chipsets (not necessarily very good chipsets, but often better than what AMD came up with). With P4s they weren't really good, but Via was the first manufacturer with a DDR-based P4 chipset (P4X266). That pretty much forced Intel to release something similar - and resulting in them getting rid of RDRAM. All the reasonably early boards I've used with Via chipsets have been very good. It's just the late ones (when Via really turned into a super-low-budget manufacturer) where there have been problems. Even so, some of the chipsets (like the PT880) still do seem to be fine. I'm well aware of how good the i440BX is. The i440BX was great for its time, but eventually the Via ones did have their advantages (133Mhz FSB support and AGP4x in particular). At this point, I'm not actually sure why I put those quotes around 'decent'.
I don't understand what people have against the K8 VIA chipsets.. bar their overclocking ( PCI-e locking weaknesses) I found the entire Asus K8V range (as an example) to be nothing but trouble free, used them all the time. Cannot speak for later revisions, I know some of the 939 VIA boards are puss, but that may just be down to their lack of popularity and hence bios issues.. If anything I'd bag early Nforce (up to 3, and 4 if you include their occasional SATA and Lan firewall issues (later disabled by mfgers anyway)
I think that that is crap. For Socket A in the era before Barton 3200 and nforce2 Ultra 400 I reckon that KT333 was a rocking chipset. Think Abit KX7-333R and Epox 8K5A variants. Real overclockers don't need no steenkin' pci bus lock! my $0.02
Heres the thing People only used VIA chipsets because they had no other choice. This was the case in the early AMD socket A days. as soon as nforce came about... everyone dropped and ran like it was a bad smell
