Originally posted by: taltamir
Originally posted by: chizow
No offense Taltamir, but I think you're a bit misguided in your opinion on NV chipsets. If you think every case with an NV chipset is due to a bad board, there's a helluva lot of bad NV boards out there. There's just so many different cases where an NV board works fine....until you start adding components or RAM or use Vista and then the board starts flaking out. Not to mention boards from the same makers with Intel chipsets don't exhibit the same problems nearly as often......
In the case of my X-Fi, its not only Creative at fault, as I had the card working fine under XP on the same exact rig. Once I upgraded to Vista and 4GB RAM, I couldn't get the card running at all without crashes/BSODs/etc. Other users reported the latest drivers from Creative fixed Vista problems for a while, until MS released a hotfix that broke the drivers again by creating a memory allocation conflict. The problems with Vista/NV chipsets/Creative aren't just driver related though, as there's just resource allocation problems all over (IRQs, memory addresses etc). I'm sure some of it is just a pissing contest between MS/NV/Creative but the end-result is a massive headache.
And I did end up replacing my board and eating the cost since Newegg/Asus don't let you "return" it. It took 3 kits because the rig was perfectly stable a few months at a time and I had no choice but to run 1 kit while the other was out on RMA until my new board came in. If I had to do it all over again, I would've just gotten an Intel chipset, probably wouldn't have had to go through 3 RMAs and I'd be able to use my X-Fi.
actually I KNOW it is because of a bad board... You want chipset problems, use via or sis boards for years... now those are crappy chipsets... and even then the board has ALOT to do with it.. I have seen companies make perfectly stable boards with via and sis... they just need to do the right things with the bios.
And I am greatly amused by your intel comment... It kind of goes against most reviews I have read.
What exactly makes me an NV defender? I say, and rightly so, that most of the times if you have serious flaking it is a defective board / board DESIGN. SOMETIMES there are actual chipset problems. But 1. Those are rare. 2. Those are not unique to a few individuals. 3. Those are nothing like the problems reported here... all problems I have seen before and have traced to a single defective board...
And yes there are alot of defective boards out there... I personally worked at companies who shipped parts with 30+% failure. The explanation? "it is better then not shipping it at all"