Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: CYLONN on February 10, 2005, 06:09:45 AM
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Anyone using the ASUS A8V dekuxe mb?
Skuzzy says alot of support isssues involve VIA chipset mb's.
If this board is a waste of money, does anyone have a good suggestion?
ty.:confused:
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Originally posted by CYLONN
Anyone using the ASUS A8V dekuxe mb?
Skuzzy says alot of support isssues involve VIA chipset mb's.
If this board is a waste of money, does anyone have a good suggestion?
ty.:confused:
its probably one of the best skt 939 boards out there. VIA "issues" are from 1998, not 2005
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I never metioned any particular VIA motherboard, but Overlag, I can assure you many, if not most, of the issues are with motherboards made in the last 2 years.
I will also state, it may be coincidental the issues have a VIA based motherboard involved.
CYYLON, you are probably going to have a difficult time getting an answer which is not biased. People make hefty investments in what they believe to be the best, and they will defend thier choices using all manner of rationalizations.
While I personally would not use a VIA based motherboard, I cannot, in good conscious, say Intel is any better right now. The Prescott is the worst CPU ever shipped, in my opinion. Even if you get around the heat issues, which are considerable, the performance is worse than the Northwood. The you have to deal with that awful DDR2 ram which is slower than DDR1 due to extremely high latencies and it also has significant heat issues.
It's a lousy time to be needing a computer system right now, as far as I am concerned.
Please note, this is my personal opinion based on what I do all day long. Also note, I am not a tweaker. I want a computer to just work. I do not want to have my time used up by needing to bump this, tweak that, grab a driver here and there, just to get the dang thing to boot up.
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My pov on this one would be to stick with the nVidia chipsets for the 939 boards. I have had two nVidia chipset boards and both have run great. The first one had a little issue with the temperature reading of the CPU and caused a few problems till the BIOS was updated but after that it was great.
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Originally posted by CYLONN
Anyone using the ASUS A8V dekuxe mb?
Skuzzy says alot of support isssues involve VIA chipset mb's.
If this board is a waste of money, does anyone have a good suggestion?
ty.:confused:
I'm using it with 4 ide drives (160gb, 120gb, 80gb, 40gb) , two 80gb WD sata drives (raid 0), a plextor cd burner and a plextor dvd burner, a WD 120gb external firewire drive, epson firewire scanner, X45 and ch pro peds with a AMD64 3400 cpu, 1 gig of ram and a AGP 8x ATI9800 pro
no complaints
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
I never metioned any particular VIA motherboard, but Overlag, I can assure you many, if not most, of the issues are with motherboards made in the last 2 years.
I will also state, it may be coincidental the issues have a VIA based motherboard involved.
CYYLON, you are probably going to have a difficult time getting an answer which is not biased. People make hefty investments in what they believe to be the best, and they will defend thier choices using all manner of rationalizations.
While I personally would not use a VIA based motherboard, I cannot, in good conscious, say Intel is any better right now. The Prescott is the worst CPU ever shipped, in my opinion. Even if you get around the heat issues, which are considerable, the performance is worse than the Northwood. The you have to deal with that awful DDR2 ram which is slower than DDR1 due to extremely high latencies and it also has significant heat issues.
It's a lousy time to be needing a computer system right now, as far as I am concerned.
Please note, this is my personal opinion based on what I do all day long. Also note, I am not a tweaker. I want a computer to just work. I do not want to have my time used up by needing to bump this, tweak that, grab a driver here and there, just to get the dang thing to boot up.
skuzzy, you need to try an A64 rig with a VIA chipset, you'd be supprised how much things have come along since the KT133, KT266, KT333, and KT400 chipsets. Its VIA or Nvidia and nvidia have more issues than VIA right now.
underlined bit is totaly true though......
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It's just my opinion, but I switched from my usual ABIT brand mobos to the MSI board I have for no reason other than ABIT didn't release an nforce3 250 board. If ABIT had a non-via socket 939 board worth a darn, I'd have bought it. But they don't, and the MSI boards are true enthusiast boards will pretty much every feature under the sun, so I went with the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum.
ASUS boards are good, and some of the via boards benchmark as fast or faster than the nforce boards, but I'm mostly on Skuzzy's side here regarding via boards. I don't think there are any showstopper issues with via socket 939 boards right now and they're pretty much just as fast as the nforce boards, but the nvidia chipset boards are at least as good overall. It's just too bad ABIT chose to stiff-arm nvidia this round. I think they'll learn from their mistake and eventually offer an nforce4 board, but it could take a while.
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Overlag I have a friend who has one. He came over to my place and built his rig while I was building mine.
Took him about a week to get it all stable. It works ok, except his Audigy 2ZS has a slight hum from the speakers. He probably would have missed it, except for the comparison to mine.
After it was all said and done, he told me he wished he bought what I did and he is very bias towards AMD.
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I use an A8V deluxe with 2 SATA 120Gb drives.
No complaints here.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Overlag I have a friend who has one. He came over to my place and built his rig while I was building mine.
Took him about a week to get it all stable. It works ok, except his Audigy 2ZS has a slight hum from the speakers. He probably would have missed it, except for the comparison to mine.
After it was all said and done, he told me he wished he bought what I did and he is very bias towards AMD.
thats more of a creative audigy problem though isnt it?
a week to get a system stable? thats odd, mine was plug and play untill i started tweaking and messing things up ;)
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The Audigy 2ZS works perfectly in my system. I know that VIA + Creative, in the past, has had problems, but do not know if that is still the case. The only time there have been Audigy issues has occurred with VIA based motherboards. Even Creative acknowledges it.
It's kind of funny. Everytime I see a complaint about an Audigy card, there is an AMD based system attached to it.
In his system, the hum persists, but the card seems to be free of other noise. He tried different PCI slots, different cables, different headset, different speakers.
I do not know exactly the issues he had that caused it to take so long to get it stable. I know he re-installed the operating system three times. I am not much help on his configuration, as I have no experience with it. I told him to come post here, but he would rather figure out for himself.
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I don't want to hijack, but Audigy + VIA on my system is garbage. It does not want to recognize the card for Creative's drivers, but it will take on 3rd party drivers. I made a thread a few months ago with this issue. The card works, but not as it should on other mobos. The board is a MSI K8T800 --
Do any sound cards exist that can compete with Audigies in the realm of gaming (and have no real issues with VIA)? Turtle Beach's Catalina is lacking in the DSP department and eats up CPU cycles. Does Creative have the gaming dept. cornered? I really don't want to purchase a new motherboard.
[/hijack]
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forgot to mention my sound card:
Audigy 2 - no problems
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
The Audigy 2ZS works perfectly in my system. I know that VIA + Creative, in the past, has had problems, but do not know if that is still the case. The only time there have been Audigy issues has occurred with VIA based motherboards. Even Creative acknowledges it.
It's kind of funny. Everytime I see a complaint about an Audigy card, there is an AMD based system attached to it.
In his system, the hum persists, but the card seems to be free of other noise. He tried different PCI slots, different cables, different headset, different speakers.
I do not know exactly the issues he had that caused it to take so long to get it stable. I know he re-installed the operating system three times. I am not much help on his configuration, as I have no experience with it. I told him to come post here, but he would rather figure out for himself.
i think the issue is down to how VIA follows PCIs design rules to the word or something, and the creative design is border line on the PCI spec or something, thats what i read about the SBlive and the old issues before, not sure about the Audigy2 though. Any chance he might have got a faulty card? Audigy1 works fine for me, and my friend built 2 systems with Audigy2's in them, never an issue....
its much like the USB issues VIA had before 2002, the USB design calls for 500ma per port, but some devices pulled alittle more than this, causing people to blame VIA's USB ports for dying when its really the USB device thats overspec. of coarse they "fixed" this now, even though it wasnt there problem for following the design......
Intel designs have more tolerence....afterall they did design most of the PCI/USB/everything.
Even id say id love a Intel chipset with a AMD CPU...but sadly thats no longer possible.
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He is going to bring his box over to the house this weekend and we will swap our cards around to see if it his sound card.
Oct, Creative pretty much has a lock on PCI gaming sound cards. Turtle Beach use to have some nice cards, but they now use off the shelf parts for thier cards which are pretty CPU intensive.
I have always said Intel could make a killing if they provided a chipset to support the AMD CPU. I know I would be all over that one in a heartbeat. Sad it will never happen.
NVidia's chipsets are getting better. I think they need some more field time, but they are getting there. I am curious as to how ATI's new chipset will do, but I think they are in the same boat as NVidia. A little too new to the market.
This is where Intel has everyone beat. So much field time on thier side.
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You know I am a true AMD fan, but the via (or Asus) issues are a pain in the behind. I have the same motherboard and it works flawlessly NOW, but setup was a real pain. It is a very good motherboard but I would suggest that you goto http://www.viaarena.com and perform a search in the board to read a few installation (software)tips before installing the board.
So that said. I like the board BUT it was a bit painful getting the right drivers / bios, installation order etc in place
Acetnt
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ASUS MOBO fan here also.
But I can attest to the Audigy2ZS problem. I have a new one in the box. I installed it...swapped out a SBLive 5.1. This was on my last system and AthlonXP 2400 with the VIA chipset on the mobo. The Audigy caused me nothing but grief. Reloaded OS (Win2K Pro) did everything but wouldn't work properly,
Now...since I had a SBLive 5.1 and Klipsch 5.1 speakers why the hell did I need to go to the Audigy anyway?
End of story....took the Audigy back out...reinstalled the SB5.1 and everything worked great....even migrated the 5.1 Live to my new Athlon64 3400 system.
Moral of story.....if it ain't broke don't fix it. The Audigy wouldn't have done much or anything for my system anyway. But for the urge to "upgrade" which wasn't really justified.
Anyway....the ASUS Mobo that I use now (K8V SE Deluxe) has a super 6 channel ADI AD1980 SoundMax AC 97 audio CODEC onboard. Also Runs 5.1 in surround mode. Methinks the soundcard will be needless in the future...if not now. They were needed in the past for the miniport.....who uses miniports for game controlers now?
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The real problem are the Creative drivers. They're too intrusive and can mess up your system totally.
I've made a firm decision to not touch Creative again. No reason why I should really.
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All of my VIA experience is with Asus CUV4X and TUV4X boards using VIA 294X and 294T chipsets.
I bought the CUV4X when it was relatively new. The BIOS had issues. The VIA drivers had issues. Within a few months, fixes were released and my PC finally performed as well as it should have.
I did have trouble installing a SoundBlaster 512 PCI.
The nice thing about the CUV4X was that unlike any of the Intel boards from the same time frame: support for the much later 1GHz P3, up to 1.5GB of RAM and fully functional AGPx4 support.
Despite the initial teething troubles and the issues with Creative products, I saw good prices for P3 1.2GHz Tualatins and TUV4X motherboards that supported them. The TUV4X completely rejected the SoundBlaster Live! card. I ended up with Turtle-Beach Santa Cruz sound cards.
WindowsXP caused some issues, so bios and chipset driver changes were provided almost as fast as the issues were reported.
I still have two CUV4X P3 1GHz and two TUV4X P3T 1.2GHz PCs in operation. They play every game presently on the market, but in modern sims like AH2 and LOMAC, the quality settings have to be mid-range or lower. I have been so happy with the way these PCs perform that I keep delaying buying new hardware (which has the benefit of ensuring I will see a huge leap in performance when I finally do).
Based on my experience, I would not have a problem buying a VIA motherboard. In fact, having read some online reviews and discussions by people trouble-shooting their hardware, I am leaning toward buying AMD CPU rather than Intel for the first time with Asus A8V-E Deluxe motherboards.
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I also use the Asus A8V.
No problems although i do use this version of the SB drivers for my audigy2 EAX4DRV_AUDIGY2_1_84_50.
I also only install the basic drivers i do not have the SB crap running in the background.
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Running my first Gigabyte MB with AMD 4000 (939) and is running great.... Havn't heard much about said Gigabyte recently but I have No complaints...