Why do people hate VIA / KT333?

[eqmassa]

It seems like a great chipset from all I've read. A few people on this board, however, have shown great disdain towards the KT333 chipset and VIA in general. This is all that's holding me back from purchasing an Asus A7V333 motherboard, but try as I might, I can't seem to find any bad reviews or hints at Geforce, etc. compatibility issues with VIA.

Gaming PC in progress, suggestions welcome

 

[CMRvet]

VIA has had a mixed reputation of being a good performer with bad stability/IRQ problems. They also used to release a “half” working chipsets (i.e.KT133) and few months later the full version (KT 133A)

About the KT333: month ago I was deciding between MSI 745 Ultra (SIS 745) and the MSI KT3 Ultra (VIA KT333). Finally decided for KT3 and am really happy. No problem at all, and VIA is not even thinking (in my knowledge) on releasing a chipset KT333A.
I think I did pretty much the same than you: many possitive reviews, almost none negative ones= buy


<b>(<font color=yellow>as good as it looks</font color=yellow>)</b>

 

[eqmassa]

Thanks for the background. Well, I love the specs on the A7V333, but I will go for the A7S333 if I must due to compatibility/stability. Here are my specs by the way:

Sound: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz $60
Floppy: Teac $10
CD-ROM: Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM $40
Network: Linksys EtherFast 10/100 NIC (will this work w/DSL modem?) $15
CPU: AMD 1800 266FSB (green wrapper, .13) $80
HD: Maxtor, 7200rpm, 40gb, IDE, D740X-6L $75
RAM: 512MB PC2700 $120
GPU: Gainward Geforce4 Ti-4200 Golden Sample $160

Gaming PC in progress, suggestions welcome

 

[Crashman]

VIA lies about bugs in their chipsets. In fact, they lied about certain bugs in the PCI bus and AGP problems for over two years before they finally fixed them. And then they still said the problems were everybody elses fault! Meanwhile, there wasn't much else available for AMD processors, so AMD guys would lie about their (VIA platform) systems being perfectly stable because they didn't want their favorite company to loose face. So it really makes sense that some people don't trust anything that's said about these products, my best friend could say his KT333 platform is perfect, and I wouldn't know if he were telling the truth or just trying to get me on "his side". The only stable AMD systems I've had have been on older ALi/Intel chipsets (socket 7) and SiS. I gave up on VIA back in the KT133 days, and have fixed many problems on KT133A and KT266 systems directly related to the chipset. Now, the systems I repair are out of warrantee, so the fact that I haven't seen any KT266A or KT333 systems is more likely due to the fact that most of these systems are still under warrantee, not indicating better quality.

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had ask more questions first!</font color=blue>

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Don't forget though, the Kt333 is not actually a "new" Via chip. It is indeed, "just" the Kt266a with validation for PC-2700 DDR and some additional featuers (example, USB 2.0). There's no reason for a Kt333a, unless all of a sudden, AMD decides to release a 166Mhz FSB T-bred. Barton on the other hand...

"When there's a will, there's a way."

 

[eqmassa]

It would be nice to be ready when they do

Gaming PC in progress, suggestions welcome