all new southbridges support higher ATA100, and I found the Intel 82801BA the best among the lot. basically intel's driver support is far better than VIA's! even ALi and SiS southbridges are good, they have no compatibility problems so far, and they do provide consistent performance.
VIA has a long tradition of crappy southbridges I've seen right from the 486 times VIA 686B can have many problems with compatibility, device support, IRQ issues, strange problems regarding IRQ usage by other devices as well as data corruption at the worst! you can get a million complaints on the VIA southbridge just by searching for "686" in these pages of THG!!!
my Duron on KT133 i got almost a year ago has the 686A southbridge that supports ATA/66, tested a Seagate 8.4 GB ATA/66 drive on that and it gave 13 MB/sec! installed VIA Bus Master drivers that came along with the board and got 9 MB/sec!!! downloaded and installed VIA's every 4in1 driver versions but still it doesnt go past 12!!! and the same drive posted 54 MB/sec on a friend's 810e board and 88 MB/sec on Intel D815EEA2 that has the 801BA ICH2 supporting ATA/100! i cant say more.
girish
<font color=blue>die-hard fans don't have heat-sinks!</font color=blue>