Definitely go with VIA. K8T800/K8M800 are rock solid and has much better DOS compatibility with PCI cards.

Both VIA and nVidia have their chipset issues. As already mentioned, VIA has better DOS compatibility for sound cards. On the other hand it doesn't support SATA2 or SATA3 drives (sometimes they work if they have a SATA1 compatibility jumper, but even that isn't necessarily reliable). nForce chipsets also have a tendency to get (too) hot, so you should consider adding some active airflow over the usually puny chipset cooler.

They both can also have their own driver issues. I've had nForce not install properly or cause blue screens, while I've had VIA Hyperion missing drivers for some components or cause conflicts or errors after installation. Honestly I wouldn't call either of them good in terms of driver reliability.

This is all based mostly on dealing with nForce 2/3/4 and KT600/K8T800/K8M800 boards on Windows 9x/ME. I haven't had much experience with SiS chipsets though, so can't really comment on those.

SiS chipsets are good. Not performance kings but very solid. I like the kt333 chipset.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-06-12, 04:27:

Definitely go with VIA. K8T800/K8M800 are rock solid and has much better DOS compatibility with PCI cards.

Well I'm glad I asked cause I didn't knew that.

frudi wrote on 2020-06-12, 10:15:

Both VIA and nVidia have their chipset issues. As already mentioned, VIA has better DOS compatibility for sound cards. On the other hand it doesn't support SATA2 or SATA3 drives (sometimes they work if they have a SATA1 compatibility jumper, but even that isn't necessarily reliable). nForce chipsets also have a tendency to get (too) hot, so you should consider adding some active airflow over the usually puny chipset cooler.

They both can also have their own driver issues. I've had nForce not install properly or cause blue screens, while I've had VIA Hyperion missing drivers for some components or cause conflicts or errors after installation. Honestly I wouldn't call either of them good in terms of driver reliability.

This is all based mostly on dealing with nForce 2/3/4 and KT600/K8T800/K8M800 boards on Windows 9x/ME. I haven't had much experience with SiS chipsets though, so can't really comment on those.

Yeah, no chipset is perfect specially in 9x, thats why I asked. I had my share of issues with some older VIA chipsets in the past under 9x and same with nForce 2.
I plan to use an IDE drive so will not have SATA problems. Thanks

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-12, 10:24:

SiS chipsets are good. Not performance kings but very solid. I like the kt333 chipset.

I never liked SiS, always had crap performance AND stability issues, mainly in PCChips motherboard, but I asked cause that could be different this time.

SiS were premium chipset manufacturers in the 386/486 days. Their K7/K8 chipsets are also fairly robust if not high performance. I believe the hate towards SiS chipsets stems mostly from their rather mediocre Pentium onwards Intel platform chipsets?