Hello All.

I know most of you "enthusiasts" will consider good news. VIA chipsets in the past years haven't been top notch. But they were cheap and reliable. One of my best chipsets was VIA in the form a MSI k7t Turbo Limited Edition. I'm using a Asus M2V atm, still working and going strong. I read it on The Inquirer so, it might not be true, although they post a lot of FUD, they usually got some truth on it.

In my POV It is horrible news, and everybody is heading the proprietary way. Intel with Intel Chipsets, AMD with AMD chipsets and now Nvidia only doing GPUs also. I can feel the price of mobos going up and the features being regulated by pricing. Intel vs AMD war will still wage but anyway, VIA wont be here to keep them in-line with decent pricing. Might be only my imagination or fear but i don't see too much good coming from it. History is too much a teacher when it comes to "closed" tecnologies.

RAMBUS RIMMS pricing. Via saved the day after the contract expired with Intel. It joined the old Willamette with SDRAM.
OLD 386/486 Clones. Via Provided the chipsets.
K6,K6-II and K7 socket 7. Via Provided the chipsets.
During transition fases like mobos with DDR and DDR2 slots. Via Provided the Chipsets.
During transition fases like mobos with AGP and PCIE Slots. Via Provided the Chipsets.
This i recall from the top of my head.

Via is long time chipset maker for the x86 platform. It provided "value" chipsets, and some pretty good, giving more diversity to the market. If they leave well.....in my POV it is very sad news.

My POV is that VIA has never produced decent enough chipsets for either side so I say meh to them.

Don't care.... My money is for reliable chipset only.....

I would be surprised and saddened if VIA left the market.
Although there is not much of a demand in the enthusiast market, they do offer fairly solid chipsets for value and OEM products.
No matter what the conception of their products, they offer much needed competition in the market.

I never seen one working well, but ive never seen one working so badly. Really. And i guess it is all my fault.

i used a via chipset for ma amd k6 machine and it lasted 6.5yrs b4 i sold it.
via fefinately lags in terms of performance. however, (i no ppl will disagree) i think via does the job well for the low end market.its stable and solid for the price tag it has

hmmm, to be honest, im not sad to see them go, really i hate having to work on someones computer they bought from a Computer supermarket for £350 with a naf chipset. which has packed in.

they are almost as bad as the time a friend of mine could work out why he couldnt play HL2 on the SIS grapic adaptor.

and also toms polls suck.

NOWAI !!!

One of the great human qualities (that some of us have, not all) is too laugh at ourselves.

This considering i work for a major brand in costumer support, and i'm supposed to fix "stuff". And i "fixed" that Poll really good. It is now down for prosperity. Or for whenever someone deletes this post.

And nothing of value was lost.

I remember trying to upgrade from a P100 to a K6-2/350 was a nightmare. I didn't know from motherboard chipsets back then. I went through three motherboards with VIA MVP chipsets - each one was unstable to the point where an operating system couldn't even be installed without a fatal crash. I was advised to look for some other chipset - ANY other chipset, wound up with an Asus P5A-B with an ALi chipset - worked like a champ. I felt so burned by VIA that I avoided them like the plague for years after, actually seeking out a board with an ALi chipset for my Athlon XP system a few years later, despite assurances that VIA had since cleaned up their act.

I did, eventually, buy one more VIA-based board when I was building my Athlon 64 (939). I didn't want ATI or Nvidia chipsets because I didn't want/need integrated video, so it was either VIA or SiS. Turns out I bought the ONLY socket 939 board Asus made that was incapable of supporting X2 when it was released due to unresolvable chipset incompatability.

So really, good riddance, VIA.

good bye VIA u were always a Looser go Nvidia and ATI chipsets

Of course they are. Intel canceled their license and nVidia\ATi have AMD locked up. Hey, they still have Isaiah to make chipsets for. Interesting though that Intel canceled it right around the time C7 was due for an upgrade.

VIA started in the CPU market didn't go well and went into chipsets and mobile device market.

they probably don't sell enough chipsets to make a profit off of since well Intel chipsets are more stable, nVidia chipsets offer SLI and AMD has thier own better ATI based chipsets.

In all I am sure VIA has good reasoning to leave the chipset market, more than likely its not profitable enough to stay.

I deleted my post anyways... I hate stating the obvious.

When I worked at a company building add-in boards for PCs a few years ago we were continually having to put workarounds in the drivers to handle VIA chipset problems.

Maybe they got better over time, but after that experience I'd never have even considered buying one; in fact, I didn't even realise that they were still making chipsets.