An Answer to an Email from VIA

[Helznicht]

Tex, I do see your point to some extent, but I think most members of this board are pretty anal about having the latest and best drivers, so this argument will be a pretty hard win here.

BTW, Im pulling my eye lashes out waiting for the Geforce Det4s to be released, I hope they hurry up, I only got 3 left.....

 

[Ausm]

I see his point also even though I totally disagree with

Ausm

 

[Adul]

I would never install a A new p4 system, p3 system with out the proper chipset drivers. Use they work with standard drivers, but it hurts peformance. It is just like video cards with the vga drivers, they all work with standard drivers, but to get what the system is capable of you need to install the proper drivers. Win98 and win2k do not provide true native support for those chipsets in question, they only provide support for ones prior to their build. So when a new chipset comes along, they just use a standard driver, not the actual driver intel has taken time to write up for that chipset.

Texmaster, the reason some of the members here wanted to correct you is because they rather see people state correct information.

 

[TunaBoo]

Waaa it takes 30 seconds to install a patch to my win2k install

 

[Budman]

I just dont see what the fuss about the 4in1 drivers is.

I mean you dont think twice about installing a video card or nic or modem driver,why should the motherboard be any different?

 

[WetWilly]

A lot of problems with the 4-in-1s aren't necessarily the drivers themselves, but the install process itself - e.g., do I install them with x OS? I've got a non-VIA northbridge with a VIA southbridge - what do I install? A good number of VIA board problems can be traced directly back to non-existent or incomplete/improper install of the 4-in-1s.

VIA would have saved themselves and their reputation a lot of grief if the 4-in-1s were a one-step process that analyzes your OS and your system board, figures out which drivers are needed, and installs them without fuss.

 

[weovpac]

oldfart, is correct and like TunaBoo said,



<< Waaa it takes 30 seconds to install a patch to my win2k install >>

 

[codehack2]

<< Its not a question of it being hard. For a home user its an easy step. However, times that patch update by 1000 computers at work and you will start to see the time turn into money. >>




Please do not take any offense here, but your company needs to learn how to use logon scripts and silent installs.

CH2

 

[Shagga]

Just my bit. I have an ASUS P3V4X. You all know this has the VIA Apollo Pro133A Chipset. I had at the time of the Mobo purchase Win98SE. Now, my system ran fine without installing any 4 in 1 drivers. One, because I didn't know what they were about, and two, I didn't know they existed.

It wasn't until a few Websites, Anandtech included, that I found that there was poor performance with with particular mobo, if I recall correctly. Now, a new 4 in 1 drivers set was released and the performance increased up there with the best performers.

So, my system seemed to function correctly b4 the new 4 in 1 installation. It just ran more efficiently and quicker with the new drivers.

But, having said that, it doesn't bother me too much to install updated drivers.

 

[Eris23007]

Personally, I don't mind installing the 4-in-1 drivers. My problem with VIA is that, really, their chipsets just don't work quite right with a whole lot of PCI cards.

I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but it's the truth. If any of you have EVER tried to take a KT133A chipset mobo with a RAID chip, use two hard drives, and install a PROFESSIONAL audio card, you know what I'm taling about. I've seen, first hand, SO many DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) setups where somehow the motherboard just wasn't tweaked quite right. The results can range from the annoying (clicks and pops in the sound outputs of the aforementioned pro audio card) to the catastrophic (the data loss issue with the SB Live!).

There is a reason that professional musicians still tend to buy Intel systems even though most audio processing uses FP-heavy code (which gives Athlon a HUGE performance advantage). Though I agree that a significant portion of this is Intel's marketing, the fact is that Intel systems take WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY less tweaking to get them to work right, on the whole. Though I personally choose Athlons and just keep hacking at the BIOS and messing around with new driver installs and so on and so on and so on, I have ceased recommending Athlons to musicians on the PC recording forum I frequent just because most of those people don't have the technical skills to actually get the damn machines to work. In fact I know people who DO have those skills and STILL can't get them to work right even after spending hours trying.

This is the reason I'm really looking forward to nFORCE - if NVIDIA does it right, AMD will finally shed the &quot;compatibility problem&quot; image.

Jake