First post, by totoro
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello,
This is my first post in this forum. I like to tinker with computer hardware and lately been bitten by the retro-bug. It is fun to build some common or high end systems from back in the day and experience their glory once again. I find this forum to be a great resource in this en-devour.
I have encountered many motherboards with VIA Chipsets in my early days of computing and, as as they were common then, so they are commonly available now as well. At least where I live. My experience with VIA Chipsets always has always been a mixed bag tough. I find them to be quite finicky, but with decent potential. Depending on the BIOS implementation and finding the right drivers, they can perform pretty well and also can be very flexible. Last, but not least, motherboards with VIA Chipsets tend to cost less.
That said, the main and most troublesome issue I had with them 15-20 years ago and now is their IDE performance! The DMA never seemed to work right with VIA for some obscure reason! For me this is evident both on Windows 98 and 2k/XP systems. If I use normal spinning hard drive either with IDE interface or SATA drive through any sort of adapter, I can enable DMA mode on Win98 (and on 2k/XP it is enabled automatically or so it seems), however, the actual desktop experience is not great. Startup is choppy, the system is laggy when installing software of doing any light to moderate Drive IO involved tasks. If I use any sort of sata ssd drive via adapters, then I was never able to enable DMA at all! I check the DMA checkbox, then system reboots as normal, but after reboot I find the DMA unchecked again and the same poor and choppy desktop experience. It does not seem to matter what kind of drivers I use.
For the longest time this drove me nuts and made me to prefer systems with Intel Chipsets, as they Just Work (TM)!
And now, after 20 years, the mistery is solved!
Turns out, when the Chipset driver is installed, only the main (father/root) PCI IDE Controler driver is updated to use the VIA driver. Both Primary and Secondary controllers remain using generic Microsoft driver and thus ruining the system compatibility and performance! Once I've figured to actually try and manually force these to use Bus Master IDE controller drivers from VIA I was left amazed! The DMA mode started to work properly and the performance both with spinning disks and SSD's is now AMAZING! No more laggy, choppy stuff happening, all is smooth and overall, very fast!
So there you have it, hope this helps some one out!
Penguin Workshop
https://viekelis.lt