On Saturday 18 August 2001 10:21, Tom Brinkman wrote: > On Friday 17 August 2001 08:06 pm, Kirby Urner wrote: > > I notice Abit KT7A is green lined at Mandrake website, > > meaning tested. My KT7E uses same VIA KT133E /VIA 686B > > chipset. So maybe I shouldn't be fearing some VIA bug > > after all (savvy guy Brinkman was suggesting Abits could > > be problematic, yet none of the Soyo MBs listed at > > Mandrake are green lined :-D). > > I wasn't referring to Mandrake hardware listing, I was referring to > the recommended motherboard list at www1.amd.com. Mandrake is a very > small company with very limited resources and people for testing > hardware. AMD has neither restriction. To further clarify what I did > say. The Abit boards were dropped by AMD. If you search hardware news > from about last March, you'll find that this is true and caused quite > an uproar. AMD gave no explanation, but it was about the same time the > VIA-IDE bug surfaced. > > My comment that the Abit's seem to be havin the most problems is > from many months of reading hardware sites (that do extensive testing) > and newsgroups (actual users). In fairness tho, I suspect this could > very well be because at the time they were the most popular board. So > there's more of them out there to have problems. Abit also produced > the most boards with the popular (win)RAID feature, which has it's own > problems. Even their non-RAID boards use the same design, the RAID > parts are just left out. > > Your kt133e is just a stripped down, slightly cheaper version of > the kt133a. It still has the exposure to the VIA-IDE bug. Again, while > the bug is real, I believe much too much is being made out of it. All > processors, all electronic components for that matter, have bugs > (errata). Some can be serious on their face, yet have consequences that > are rare and/or and of very little real world risk. An example could be > the Pentium 90 cpu divide by 0 bug of a few years ago. IOW's, no matter > what cpu and chipset you use, it has bugs. > > > If there was some disconnect between AMD and Abit over > > VIA/Apollo chipset, I don't find any mention at the > > website. > > Historically, AMD has never given reasons for putting, or not > putting motherboards on their recommended list, publically or to OEMs. > I believe they have this policy to convey impartiality. What can be > said is that all kt133? chipset boards are not created equal. The > design of the traces, capacitors, pcb, etc. vary between manufacturers. > Also, some manufacturers might try to include some extra features which > can cause problems, eg (win)RAID, 'soft menu' bios rather than jumpers, > etc. Another variable is BIOS design itself. While most kt133? boards > use the same basic Award bios, various motherboard manufacturers > include their own modifications and features. > > I should also again point out that the VIA chipsets are not being > cited as the sole source of the IDE bug. High wattage/bandwidth PCI > devices are getting most of the blame, particularly the SB Live!. Also > power supplies are being blamed. AMD has a recommended list for those > too. The bug has not been observed on boards that use jumpers and dip > switches, don't have (win)RAID, are connected to proper power supplies, > and don't have high bandwidth PCI cards plugged into 'em. The Soyo > k7vta pro is such a board, and I believe this is why it's still on > AMD's reccomended list of kt133? boards for their fastest 133/266 > cpu's. It also got strong Linux suitability recommends from > LinuxHardware and Duke of URL. Maybe Mandrake doesn't have one to test? Soyo and Shuttle are very rare or nonexistent in France. Civileme > > YMMV, all the above is nothin but my own conjecture and opinions ---------------------------------------- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; name="message.footer" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Description: ----------------------------------------
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://wwww.mandrakestore.com
