Do you have a VIA based motherboard? (viahardware.com)

Member Name: cjkace

Product:	viahardware.com
Date:	22/05/01 (715 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Helps you to solve problems, latest reviews and news

Disadvantages: Biased towards VIA products, obviously

If you do own a motherboard based on a Via chipset, then this is the number one website for information, latest news and reviews of all the latest products.

If you don't know anything about the company, here's a little detail. They are based in Taiwan and are the number one producer of motherboard chipsets, both for Intel and AMD processors. In fact when AMD first launched the Athlon and Duron processors, VIA were the only manufacturer to produce a chipset in sufficient numbers for the chips to be the success they have. Recently VIA have also acquired the Cyrix line of processors and the S3 graphics company, so they now produce the three major components for a PC. Motherboard, processor and graphics chips.

ViaHardware was set up as an information repository for all things VIA and has been doing an excellent job, frequently listing the latest motherboard drivers before even the main VIA website. Reviews of all the latest hardware products are listed, with links to other sites that review hardware as well.

There are six main sections to the site.

Reviews

Exactly what you think it is. This section deals with reviews of the latest hardware that they have tested, whether it's for Intel or AMD processors. Also tests the latest Cyrix based processors and a few graphics cards.

News

Lists latest hardware news that has been posted on the internet, by other sites.

Articles

Write ups on various problems that could affect users of VIA products as well as how to fix them. Frequently tests different versions of drivers against each other, so you can choose the best one.

Hardware Links

List of other hardware sites.

FAQ

Got a question? Visit the FAQs section where all the main questions have been answered for you.

Forum

Can't find what you want in FAQs? Then post a message in the VIA forum. This is one of the friendlies
t forums that I have ever visited, with a minimum of 'flamers' unless you post a question that is wildly off-topic.


I have had a VIA based motherboard for the three years that I have owned a PC and this has become the site I visit whenever I get some strange problems crop up. For example, when I first re-built my PC, I could never get my motherboard and graphics card to run at AGP 4x, which both were capable of. A quick visit to ViaHardware and lo and behold, one of their articles is entitled 'AGP 4x fix on VIA Apollo Pro / 133 / 133A chipsets'. I read the article, tweaked my BIOS and away we go. Both Sisoft Sandra and Powertweak now show both motherboard and graphics cards running at AGP 4x.

Because of the large amount of hardware out there, there are always going to be compatability problems, and sites like these are an invaluable source of information. Why pay an engineer, when you could do it yourself, after visiting a site like this?

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