KT600 Chipset.

[vincevega]

Is the KT600 really a lousy chipset? All the Nforce2 guys bash it. What if your only interested in a fast and stable board thats inexpensive and full of features. I think it fits the bill.
What do you guys think?

[HAL9000]

Some guys praise the VIA... I personally can't stand them on an Intel or an AMD. I personally find them to be buggy and run way too hot. No offense to other respected members of the board that do like VIA... but I hear all too often from people how good and stable they run.. they sit me at the machine and within minutes I can pull out a fatal exception error and get an excuse... It doesn't happen that often :rolleyes:.. until I see it with my own eyes.... I just can't believe it.

[Steve Scrimpshire]

I have an ASUS a7v600 and one problem I had putting it together was that the Kingston pc2700 RAM would not run at 333 MHz. I had to go into the BIOS and change the bus speed of the RAM down to 266, then everything was fine. With it at 333, I could go through POST fine, but no OS would install. I would get fatal exceptions with any version of Windows and a kernel panic trying to install Mandrake Linux 9.1. After lowering the bus speed of the RAM, everything installed just fine and it has been stable so far. I don't do alot of gaming, though and I work mainly in Linux.

Right now, my temps are
MoBo: 39 C
CPU: 57.1 C
(I already have my temp monitor adjusted to reflect the actual temperature)

CPU load:
0.15 0.06 0.02
97% idle

I just have the stock fan on the AMD XP2500+ that comes with the retail package (running at ~3900 RPMs) and 4 case fans.

I'm not a hardware person, so I can't say much more.

[Alfie]

The Via600 may be one of the best chipsets Via has produced.
I'm currently using it on a Soltek 600RL board with a Barton 2500 running @ 2.366 gigs.
Oddly enough it appears the Asus board is one of the poorer performers with the 600 chipset and MSI is the top dog,the Soltek board ranks about 3rd of 6 boards tested.
The advantage to the 600 chipset is the built in sata controller thats part of the chipset as opposed to a onboard device.
I'm using 256megs of Geil pc3200 value series and have the board running on a 410fsb(205) with the multiplier set to 11.5
The system is very stable and have no issues.
I'm looking forward to adding another 256 megs ram and putting in a WD Raptor sata hard drive,the 10,000 rpms should give the system a boost!

[vincevega]

Alfie, Are you running RAID? Ive read there's problems with Via RAID.

[sakeo]

What Vcore voltage are u using alfie?

[Alfie]

No,I'm not running raid,this is a future possibilty,I have heard of no problems with Via and raid.
The Vcore is set to 1.75,actual voltage reading is 1.712