VIA KT133A Chipset Bug?

[weswag]

I'm building a PC for editing video and multi-track audio. I'm planning on using the ASUS AV7 133 motherboard w/VIA KT133A chipset. I anticipate large loads on the PCI bus due to massive transfers of data from my SCSI and video IO controller cards. I've learned of problems with the VIA KT133A chipset under such circumstances. (See the article at:

http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-1-en.html.)

I'm wary of the VIA chipset due to these reports. The Denmark reference posts a fix, which I'm willing to try, plus VIA has a new set of drivers available, so this problem may be fixed. Is it? Would I be better off with a different chipset? Which one?
--wes

 

[Karl Blessing]

if you are worried about this problem, I would go with the original KT133 and not KT133a ( I belive the a one is the one that came with onboard audio, not sure )

I just know that the board that got 10 out of 10 from socketA was the Asus A7V without onboard Audio. being the best according to them for performance and stability.

also on another note, if you are not using ATA/100 drives as a system drive on this new system the A7V should be fine, otherwise, you might run into the delima that I had, I have a Soyo K7VTA-B now, because i needed a quick replacement, also found that I liked the fact that the ATA/100 support was on the existing IDE ports. PRoblem is that with the A7V , that you (or I specifically) could not get Win2k, Win98, or any other OS for that matter, to install to the ATa/100 drive, as a system drive, it will only use it as an extended drive (extra drive, for storage and such)

but the Soyo K7VTA-B has onboard audio(Which I Disabled since I use a SBlive! 5.1) but this probally has the KT133a I didnt pay attention to details, but I have not had much of a problem with any of the Via chipsets KT133 and up. Karl Blessing aka kb244{fastHACK}

 

[JohnS9051]

Thank you for making me aware of this article and potential bug. I have just finished building a system which is very much like the ones tested in the article.
ASUS A7V 133
ATI All-In-Wonder 128
Sound Blaster Live
Seagate 17GB ATA 33 HD
IBM 45GB ATA 100 HD
256 MB (Virtual Channel)VC133 SDRAM
I also plan to use it for video capture and editing. I haven't had a chance to test for the bug yet. I will keep you informed when I do, although, I think this bug only pertains to concurrent UDMA 100 transfers.
The difference between the KT133 and KT133a chipsets is that the KT133 uses the VIA 686a South Bridge controller and the KT133a uses the VIA 686b South Bridge controller which supports UDMA 100.
Since you plan to use SCSI drives, I don't think this bug would affect you.
If you are still worried about it you might want to consider ASUS's A7A 266 motherboard which uses the ALi M1647 North Bridge and ALi M1535D+ South Bridge controllers.This board also supports both PC1600/PC2100 DDR memory and PC133/VC133 SDRAM.
Best wishes,
John