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VIA 4-in-1 driver experiences

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First post, by swaaye

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I use 4in1 4.43v for 98se, but nothing with XP. The stock XP VIA drivers seem to support all of the features of KT333 and older and I haven't had any problems...

What experiences have you guys had with 4-in-1 drivers for VIA and various OSs?

Reply 2 of 33, by PhilsComputerLab

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Using a VIA chipset in Athlon 64 gear and Windows XP and also no issues. The installer doesn't like being run from a network share, but that's about the only issue I had 😀

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Reply 3 of 33, by kanecvr

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- For VIA MVP3, MVP4, Apollo 133 - use 4 in 1 4.35 or older. - better AGP compatibility and performance. Don't use any nvidia driver newer then 5x.xx!!!! 6x.xx drivers for example don't mesh well with 4 in 1 drivers and might bsod
- For VIA Apollo PRO, KT133 and KT266 use 4.43
- For KT333, KT400, KT600, KT880 and newer use 4.56 under Windows 98 - you should manually install all devices (CPU to AGP bridge, CPU to PCI bridge, etc) - sometimes they don't install correctly. Newer chipsets will work well under 98 with the newest drivers (Hyperion PRO 5.xx) - again, you might have to manually install the bridges from the device manager. For Win XP use Hyperion PRO 5.23 / 5.24A

Reply 4 of 33, by KT7AGuy

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I concur with kanecvr. Good advice that is confirmed by my own experiences with VIA chipsets. However, I have not had to manually install any of the drivers.

Reply 5 of 33, by swaaye

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I installed the Hyperion 5.24a pack on XP last night on my KT333+VT8235 ECS K7VTA3 v6 setup. The drivers for PCI-ISA bridge, AGP bridge and IDE installed fine on their own. Ran some quick tests. I have a SSD on a PATA adapter and it's still getting 92-96MB/s sequential read which seems like saturated UDMA6. AGP is still running 4x, with sidebanding enabled, and no fast write support with the GF4 Ti and a run of 3DMark2001 went fine.

Might be interesting to run the Tom2D benchmark to see if anything changes in GUI acceleration between AGP drivers.

I also had a ASUS K7V-T KX133 + Athlon 1000 running with the stock XP drivers last week and it seemed solid. Even AGP 4x seemed to be working ok which is not supposed to be the case with KX133. In 98SE I had been seeing glitches and instability seemingly caused by the GPU, but didn't run into anything in XP. I even played some UT2003 on there.

Reply 6 of 33, by swaaye

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Ok I ran Tom2D and 3DMark2001SE to see if there are any measurable differences between the Hyperion 5.24a AGP driver and the XP SP3 AGP driver on this KT333 setup.

In short, no there is no significant difference.

Lengthy version:

TOM2D

VIA AGP driver 5.1.0.3442 (Hyperion 5.24a) 
GF 4600 driver 93.71

BENCHMARK: DIRECT DRAWING TO VISIBLE DEVICE

Text: 4242 chars/sec
Line: 15222 lines/sec
Polygon: 3175 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 4847 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 6775 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 11246 operations/sec
Stretching: 60 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 10369 splines/sec
Score: 666

BENCHMARK: DIB-BUFFER AND BLIT

Text: 16160 chars/sec
Line: 33891 lines/sec
Polygon: 4797 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 521 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 6793 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 404 operations/sec
Stretching: 90 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 16289 splines/sec
Score: 765
VIA AGP driver 5.1.2600.5512 (XP SP3)
GF 4600 driver 93.71

BENCHMARK: DIRECT DRAWING TO VISIBLE DEVICE

Text: 4242 chars/sec
Line: 15766 lines/sec
Polygon: 3211 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 4847 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 6802 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 11244 operations/sec
Stretching: 60 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 10358 splines/sec
Score: 669

BENCHMARK: DIB-BUFFER AND BLIT

Text: 16265 chars/sec
Line: 34827 lines/sec
Polygon: 4985 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 544 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 6963 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 405 operations/sec
Stretching: 90 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 16617 splines/sec
Score: 781

3DMARK2001SE
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Reply 7 of 33, by kaputnik

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Stayed on 4.42 for a long time on my KT133/Thunderbird rig back in the days, the OS was W2K . Had some problems with choppy sound when there was I/O over the Promise Ultra100 card in that computer with the 4.43's. Not sure if it was a problem with the chipset, the controller card, the OS, or even some combination of the three though. Once I installed XP, I could use the 4.43's without any problems, together with the Promise drivers bundled with XP.

Got 4.43 installed on my KT133A/Thoroughbred/W98SE rig now. Haven't had any problems with them, but then again, you don't really use a retro rig the same way as your main computer.

Reply 8 of 33, by PhilsComputerLab

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swaaye wrote:

I have a SSD on a PATA adapter and it's still getting 92-96MB/s sequential read which seems like saturated UDMA6

That might actually be the adapter. I think that's the speed I got when I was trying to find out its limit.

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Reply 9 of 33, by swaaye

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:
swaaye wrote:

I have a SSD on a PATA adapter and it's still getting 92-96MB/s sequential read which seems like saturated UDMA6

That might actually be the adapter. I think that's the speed I got when I was trying to find out its limit.

Could be. UDMA 133 probably tops out at less than 133 MB/s though anyway. I think 96MB/s is beyond UDMA 100.

I have two different adapters. Not sure if they use different chips. Maybe I will look....

Reply 10 of 33, by swaaye

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So I have two SATA to PATA adapters. One fits into the motherboard's PATA port and it uses a tiny, nameless mystery chip. The other adapter takes a PATA cable and converts that to SATA and uses a larger JMicron chip. Both produced about the same sequential read rate with the SSD on the VT8235's UDMA133 (~96MB/s max). The SSD is a Vertex 2 60GB.

On a related note, the one that fits into the mobo PATA port doesn't always agree with motherboards. Seems to work fine on this ECS K7VTA3 v6 KT333 board though.

Reply 12 of 33, by swaaye

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I took a closer look at the two adapters. I think they are both using JMicron JM20330. The PATA cable -> SATA adapter has the chip with proper identification. The "mobo PATA port" -> SATA adapter has a smaller chip with useless ID info on it ("IDE/SATA DOF 874LR0241"), but the PCB has JP103-20330-818-2 labeling. Seems likely the smaller chip is just a shrunken version of JM20330.

I also noticed that an old PATA drive to SATA adapter that I bought maybe 10 years ago is also using the JM20330 chip. I used those for optical drives for awhile.

Reply 13 of 33, by feipoa

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I have often wondered which versions of the VIA 4-in-1 to use. I have been using 4.49 for all operating systems (Win9x, NT4, W2K, XP) on MVP3 and Apollo Pro 266T based systems.

The recommendations noted above suggest that I should be using 4.35 for the MVP3 and 4.43 for the Appolo Pro 266 T systems. Does this recommendation hold only for Win9x, or is it valid for NT4, W2K, and XP operating systems?

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Reply 15 of 33, by feipoa

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I no longer recalled why I went with 4.49. This is going back some time memory-wise. It is possible that one of the lesser revision numbers did not work with my particular Apollo Pro 266T. Or maybe I was looking for a single version which worked with all my boards. I think I had been using 4.43 or 4.35 and years later I checked for an update and thought that a version between 4.43 and 4.50 would have any bugs worked out with the 4.4x series. I remember trying 5.x and it did not support some board I was trying, so decided to find the latest in the series which did work.

Is there some documented evidence identifying 4.35 as being ideal for MVP3 and 4.43 being ideal for Apollo Pro 266?

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Reply 16 of 33, by elianda

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Kanecvr post basically summarizes my own experiences: VIA 4-in-1 driver experiences

On KT266A and earlier I usually check if George Breeses PCI Latency Patch adds some PCI performance.
Also it is good to check with Powerstrip if AGP was downgraded by the graphics driver. Early NVidia driver tend to drop to AGP 1x when anything VIA is detected (Win9x).

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Reply 17 of 33, by swaaye

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elianda wrote:

Also it is good to check with Powerstrip if AGP was downgraded by the graphics driver. Early NVidia driver tend to drop to AGP 1x when anything VIA is detected (Win9x).

I think this is occurs with AGP 2x chipsets made by VIA and AMD.

Reply 18 of 33, by swaaye

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Orkay wrote:

On my Asus K7M, enabling DMA on the boot drive with the VIA utility causes a BSOD, but I only remember that happening on Windows NT 4.0. Boot drive DMA may have worked properly in 98SE, but it's been nearly a year since I last installed that on the board. DMA on all other drives works just fine on NT 4.0.

Interesting. I haven't had any trouble with K7M and UDMA. It uses the VIA 686A southbridge and that is pretty solid. I suspect the drive and controller didn't get along in some way. It can happen.

Reply 19 of 33, by Nemo1985

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Sorry for the necroposting, I did some tests with 4in1 while using tmc ti5vg+ that use the old good Via MPV3 chipset, those are my results with a k6-350 and windows 98 se:

I also tested v4.35 but results are slower, I consider the 4.26 globally the best version for mvp3, unlucky not every 4in1 version is still findable.

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