A few months ago the hard drive industry started adopting the new ATA100 standard for hard drive transfers. While hard drive manufacturers were moving to the ATA100 standard, only add-in cards and chipsets made by companies such as Promise and Highpoint Tech allowed transfer speeds up to 100mb/sec.

VIA?s ATA100 solution involved utilizing a newer south bridge. In December 2000 VIA announced their new 686B Southbridge in conjunction with the KT133A. The new Southbridge differed from its predecessor by including native support for ATA100. With native ATA100 support included in the Southbridge, motherboard manufacturers wouldn?t need to include an external ATA100 controller; saving production costs.

 

With the new Southbridge and newly released at the time; KT133A motherboards, various users started experiencing data corruption problems as well as system instability when transferring files, listening to music, or anything that utilized the PCI bus. Most incidents involved were users with a KT133A chipset, 686B Southbridge and a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live sound card. Users who had an Apollo Pro 266 + 686B and KT133 + 686B combo rarely experienced the problem.

Most occurrences of the 686B and SB Live bug were narrowed down to 2 motherboards; Abit?s KT7A/KT7A-RAID and IWILL?s KK266/KK266-R. Though the problem may occur on other KT133A boards, most run-in?s with the problems involved either the KK266 or KT7A.

 

Within a week of discovery the issue, George Breese was able to release a temporary fix. The fix involved altering some chipset registers that you could normally perform with WPCREDIT. The patch worked great and gave owners of motherboards with a 686B Southbridge and SB Live new hope. However, the patch was only a temporary fix. A permanent fix wouldn?t appear for a few months. A few months later, VIA released their new 4in1 v4.31 that contained the altered register settings into the IDE drivers. While the new drivers worked for most people, few still had problems; later on the problems were fixed with a new BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer.

 

While waiting for a fix with the SB Live, some users sought an alternative hardware fix for the matter. Some replaced their IDE controllers while most replaced their SB Live. Most users were able to seek a permanent fix by replacing their SB Live with the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Hercules Game Theater XP, or Philips Acoustic Edge.

 

Nearly 6 months later, how well do the various fixes for the 686B bug work? Today we shall find out by using the various 4in1?s, George?s patch, and of course sound card replacements with an old and newer BIOS for a KT133A motherboard to see if there have been any changes since the issue was first discovered. Just to make sure if the problem occurs in newer VIA chipsets, we will also use a KT266 board to verify that the SB Live problems don?t occur in future VIA Southbridge?s.

next > next >

---

• Page 2 (0 of 2)
• Page 3 (0 of 2)