Can I have the week-or-so of my life back that I've spent trying to get your shitty motherboard chipsets to work with numerous graphics cards / soundcards / OS's / and, once, even a USB adapter card using YOUR OWN FUCKING USB CHIPSET.

Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the arse on the way out.

At least Via can concentrate on their ultra-mini-tiny computer business. Mobile ITX should be a revolution- an x86 PC of a size you could comfortably fit in your wallet. If they're available at a decent price point (a couple of hundred quid) I can see them really taking off- I for one can think of a load of different places I could use them!

It's the one with the 10-machine server farm and battery pack built into its lining.

Surely Nvidia are Soldering on? eh eh, get it?

(The one with a Maplins catalogue in the pocket, thanks)

... where applicable, please.

There's a Via chipset on the Abit KT7 RAID mobo in my garage. It was my main PC for a while even had my 1Ghz TBird doing 1.4+Ghz on it. It has been running 24/7 with the occasional reboot for about 5 years now although at 1.1Ghz. It is used as a media/file server. When competition thins in any area it is a sad thing.

Not necessarily. As long as there is SOME competition, the situation is far from unbearable. In fact, some may welcome it since it helps narrow options while still keeping the competitive spirit going. The performance graphics market has been a two-horse race for years (only recently has Intel declared intentions to enter it) with barely a complaint.

Wow, i'm going to miss these guys. Yeah their chipsets weren't the most stable, but once you got them running, most of their components would chug along for years. Also you can't argue they were probably the best bang for buck.

(I wonder if i'm going to lose driver support on my via motherboard, sound card, and graphics card i've been running for 5 years now)

Tux? Becuase I've built many low cost systems linux systems with this chipset

One week?!?!?!? You lucky sod, I lost that on my first VIA mobo, and I had at least three others that were worse. Alas the things you do when the wallet is light.

Will hopefully at least make trying to get all your Windows drivers to play together nicely a little easier?

How will we spot low-quality MBs with flaky drivers if they no longer sport the VIA scarlet letters?

Still running a KT7A here as rip/encode/burn machine and its as stable as hell. Still have one or two bad memories of AMD K62's on VIA chipsets tho....

I remember the biggest via problems I had were with windows ME

the rest worked fine as long as you installed everything in the right order

that was on 98

Mobo drivers

Graphics Drivers

Sound Drivers

Modem Drivers (plugging this in at the end) :)

ah them were the days

and they were stable and fast and very very cheap

of course stability depended on which cheap brand of motherboard you bought

some cheap ones were very bad, others were great.

pcchips being bad

lex being not too bad

its all just way too easy these days too :)

Intel is really good at screwing up video, so were I Nvidia, I would not be concerned about Intel and SLI.

Paris, really good at screwing it up in video.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! If you installed the Via driver (on Win95, this was when Win98 was too new) the IDE driver couldn't cope with simultaneous transfers to multiple devices. Like when you install software from an IDE CD-ROM to your IDE hard drive. VC5 installer fortunately checksummed the installed files, and spotted it for me.

Oh, and the PCI bus was set up wrong, so simultaneously drawing to the screen and playing audio didn't work.

I restarted my machine so many times the CD-ROM drive died.

The PCI timing bug continued until quite recently.

No more crummy Usb 2.0 chipsets that dont support large packet throttling

No more turds of usb to ata bridges that corrupt data.

No more half arsed IEEE1394 ( fireWire) chipsets that are not OHCI compliant

No more half baked PCI implementations that don't correctly support bus mastering

No more crummy chipsets that need a ton of software 'drivers' to patch the bugs in them.

Via never wanted to pay for licences of USB , PCI or IEEE1394. They made cleanroom 99.99% compatible stuff.

Now it's just a matter of time before intel's Atom smashes that 'eden' cpu as well.

Perhaps this is a good thing. So far, Via's own chips and chipsets seem to not have been given the proper attention. I personally won't touch Via based boards with a barge pole, they're nothing but trouble, both with Windows and Linux.

If this means Via is now going to put 100% effort into their own stuff, their mobos might actually suck less, which would be a good thing, cause real competition is always a good thing.

Perhaps Via will learn a lesson from AMD. The Geode LX800 chipset rocks and consumes less energy, no driver problems. Windows, Linux, BSD or VxWorks, they always work like a charm.

And thanks for all the cheap motherboard chipsets over the years...

nVidia are happy to soldier on with their motherboard products cause they're planning to move into the CPU market, then they'll be in the same chipset providing position as AMD and Intel