gandhig wrote:
hi standard def steve, can you please elaborate on "One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards"? i have a similar setup. do you have any advice or suggestion for me?
The VIA+NVIDIA bug only rears its ugly head when you use an AGP card. If you are having issues with your PCI GT520, it's probably caused by something else. It wouldn't surprise me if newer NVIDIA drivers require (or perform much better with) a CPU that supports SSE2.
Tetrium wrote:
I'd like to know this as well. I'm planning to build a rig based on this chipset (It's in my mind atm) and such info might be handy to have beforehand 😀
When you run a GeForce FX or newer NVIDIA AGP card on most VIA based boards, 2D performance begins to deteriorate after a few minutes of use. It's a truly bizarre issue. When you first start Windows, 2D GUI performance is as fast as it should be, but after about 10 minutes of use it begins to slow down considerably. Eventually, 2D is so slow that it looks as if GDI acceleration is disabled. This happened with my FX5200, 6800GT, and 7800GS--and it not only occurred on a 694X PIII board, but also on a much newer PT880 Ultra (P4/Core 2) board. Even worse, D3D was completely unusable when the 6800 and 7800 cards were paired with any of the PIII boards (full of artifacts). Luckily, D3D was fine on the AXP and P4/Core 2 boards. Older NV cards, like the GF2MX and GF4-Ti4200 that I tested, didn't seem to have any of these problems.
You may find this thread interesting:
VIA AGP impact on GUI performance
Whether you choose NVIDIA or ATI, you'll most likely have to run in AGP 2X mode if you're going to be using it with a 694 or earlier PIII chipset. Fortunately, I didn't measure any drop in performance by capping my 9800 Pro to AGP 2X. The only VIA PIII chipset that could successfully run my cards in 4X mode all day was the rare (and extremely fast) Apollo Pro 266T. Most Athlon XP boards will have no problem running in 4x mode.
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