We all know Via's chipsets problems, ranging from the sound corruption bug to
the file corruption bugs. Well, it so happens that tecChannel investigated the
PCI implementation of the Via Southbridges and found that Via has slower PCI I/O
than Intel, SiS, or ALi. So devices that use a lot of PCI bandwidth, like IDE
and SCSI, will be restricted from it's maximum utilization. Here is a bit to get you started:
We took the following scores using MSIs 845 Pro2 (845 chipset) and VIAs P4BX (P4X266A) motherboards with this same SCSI-RAID. . . . With the MSI motherboard the RAID-0 sequentially reads data with up to 114 MBytes/s. This performance is maintained over nearly the whole capacity of the RAID: the minimum speed only drops to 106 MBytes/s. Even with burst transfers from the cards cache we found the same results. |
This looks much worse with the VIA motherboard. Our RAID there
only delivers a maximum of 72 MBytes/s with sequential reads. Although the
system also sticks with this speed over almost the whole capacity, a lot of the
potential of the RAID is wasted. To be more precise: If you spend more than 2300
Dollars for a RAID system like this, you loose 34 per cent of the performance
when this RAID has to deal with a VIA chipset.
Even with everyday tasks the differences are shuttering. If
you copy a file of 2 gigabytes on the RAID systems, the Intel solution finishes
30 per cent faster then a VIA motherboard.
Granted, the quote above talks about RAID, but the rest of the article goes
on about other problems caused by the PCI implementation Via decided to use on
their chipsets from the MVP3 to the newest Via Southrbridge. There is a
patch (as the
article also describes) that helps address these problems and actually has
received positive feedback, including fixing the sound corruption bug (did for
me ) and also improved HDD performance. Any questions on the article, just
post them below and I will try to help you guys understand. I hope this helps
you Via users out there!
Source: tecChannel
