Gigabyte Abandons KT400A press release

[Soverign]

For those who would like to see the full press release of Gigabyte's new nForce2 offering, here we go

[I][I]

We are nto releasing the contact for Gigabyte out of their respect for privacy

[Wiggo]

KT400A??? :confused:

Oh VIA. Are they still around? :?:

Soz just jokin' while I'm puttin' another 8RDA+ based PC together.

[MFaction]

via is the 3dFX of chipsets

[PersianImmortal]

They dropped the ball somewhere along the way. They had some pretty good chipsets a year or two ago (driver/stability issues aside). They took risks and were the first to bring DDR RAM to P4 before Intel finally made the move.

However a whole bunch of mess-ups, poorly performing chipsets and now the fact that the Nvidia chipsets clearly kick their butt has meant VIA is down and out for the moment.

Maybe they'll make a comeback, but I'm not really waiting for anything :)

[Soverign]

KT600 from VIA is comming very shortly. Not sure on memory support but its DDR-400, Dual status is unknown but it will have 400Mhz FSB support.

Lately VIA has thrown too much garbage onto the market to try and keep ahead, nForce2 from the design stages seems to have had VIA worrying. See it demonstrates something that I though of Intel a while back

VIA chipsets have been good cause no one challanged them, so they were the only thing to by, when someone comes along with something better you see companies like this thrown too much garbage at your and expect you to stomache it. Same as Intel P3 and RDRAM I820 chipset.

WHen VIA prought PC133 to the P3 we saw Intel make so much garbage, it was happening in the past, just didn't take notice of it.

If KT600 is a single channel DDR sollution VIA is looking at a 400Mhz FSB version of the KT400A, if they go Dual Channel, pray it works, after all, the last chipset i thought was good from VIA is the KT266A, that was my last VIA chipset, i am now nForce2 man, and with the way things are going, looking to be one for a bit in my personal systems.

[PersianImmortal]

"Fast but quirky" was the way I always thought about VIA. As you say, they brought new stuff to the market sometimes way too quickly. However my first VIA board, the P3V4X was a cult classic despite its quirks. My last VIA board, the P4X266 was rock solid and flawless in most ways (Shuttle AV40).

Now however, I can only say from my support work on VIA Arena, Overclockers Australia and around the traps that it seems VIA is just "quirky"....the fast dropped off a while ago :)

[Soverign]

I can say this, I had plenty of VIA boards for Pentium 3 and even Socket Super 7. I prefered them compared to BX and Intel chipsets at the time. I loved them for KX133, its when we started to see too many "A" chipsets VIA lost my support. After getting a KT266A and seeing that running KT333 or KT400 would be more of a backward step i lost more respect for VIA. KT400A just put my point to rest that VIA has well to many chipsets that don't live upto their sales titles.

VIA has fallen too far behind in the Pentium 4 chipsets, and we saw the infamous A come out here again. P4X266A did do ok for me, but I845D took its place as soon as it came out. Now Dual DDR is here from SiS and Intel, as well as both companies supporting Hyper Threading, something VIA hasn't got.

[Wiggo]

The KT333 was my last VIA chipset (nothin' wrong with it, for it's age) but these 8RDA+'s I've been usin' lately just leave them behind (yesterday's effort, XP1800+ T'bredB @ 12 x 166MHz) but the alternatives from ALi and SiS (now do ya's want to talk about "quirky"?) just arn't in the race at all.

[Soverign]

I never used KT333 simply because KT266A overclocked to 166FSB and allowed me better memory performance.

nVidia is definatly the chipset of choice.