That soundblaster issue doesn't just affect the 686B VIA southbridge. Recently Intel has discovered a similar issue with it's i850, i845, and i860 chipsets. The problem is a PCI bus latency issue, and as of yet there is no magic fix. Unless you've got an add on or built on ATA100 or RAID controller that you are using I doubt you will see the problem.
The problem is a complicated one, but basically what's happening is that the PCI bus has 133MB/s of bandwidth available. As you approach that limit data corruption and instability can result. The reason newer chipset are running into this issue is that things like ATA100 (or worse yet ATA133) hard drive data transfers can gobble up this bandwidth quickly. Now when you go and put in a Soundblaster card that also requires a significant amount of bandwidth and you can come right up against that limit in a hurry.
VIA tried to resolve the issue with a patch that tried to basically vary the amount of time that each device had to access the PCI bus. It helped, but doesn't actually cure the problem.
Intel has found similar issues once bandwidth requirements rise to 80 to 90MB/s.
Newer chipsets like nVidia's nForce and the VIA KT266a do not have this problem because they use their own special data bus between the "southbridge" and "northbridge" that means the PCI bus is free for other uses. I realize some of you probably don't know what I mean by northbridge and southbridge, but basically those are the two main chips that make up a chipset. The northbridge connects to the processor, memory, and AGP video card. The southbridge handles almost all other traffic, such as PCI and ISA expansion cards, hard drive transfers, USB and PS/2 ports, printer port, and serial ports. On all but the newest chipset designs all data transfers between these two chips and the components they connect to was handled over the PCI bus. Newer chipsets link the PCI bus to the southbridge only and then link the north and south bridges by a special high performance link. Some of these are called VIA Link and Hypertransport.
Later this year there will be major changes in this area with a new harddrive connection method called Serial ATA. We may also see the end of the "old" PCI bus and it's replacement by 1 of several competing standards.
Here's some more info on the problem:
http://www.theinquirer.net/17010203.htmhttp://www.viahardware.com/686bfaq.shtm
