I spent months debugging a VIA problem, gave up, and a patch was released a year later. The rest of the bugs were fixed within one more year. Two years to get a VIA chipset system to run right is not too bad a record.
I've had about as much luck with VIA. My system here at work is a P3-750 with PC100 running on an Asus P3V4X. (Despite my request at the time for a P3-733 with PC133 running on an 815 mobo. Supervisors who <i>think</i> that they know something about computers <b>suck</b>.)
Anywho, it's the old famous VIA Apollo Pro133A PoS chipset, and had the infamous VIA AGP bug, where basically <i>any</i> video card that reserved system memory (such as my Matrox Millenium G400 ... which I'm <i>required</i> to use because our customers do) has a rather high likelihood of having that memory corrupted at some point by VIA's AGP controller and thus causing a complete system lockup. (Along with many pretty colors.)
VIA wouldn't even admit that the problem existed in anything but their <i>Athlon</i> chipsets at the time. (Even though my Intel system quite clearly was affected by the very same bug.) I'm not sure if they ever did finally admit that their Intel chipsets were just as affected. But anywho, even then, it took three months just for a driver patch that <i>reduced</i> the occurance of the problem. It took another four months after that before the problem was actually fixed.
Meanwhile every chance that VIA had, they tried to blame the graphics card for the problem, no matter how many perfectly in-AGP-spec graphics cards were affected by the problem and worked just fine with any chipset <i>but</i> a VIA chipset.
I found it rather amusing that on a nearly daily basis at the time VIA would release a driver update, and in the same breath claim that it wasn't <i>their</i> fault, it was the graphics card manufacturer's fault. And with almost daily driver updates, it still took VIA a total of seven months to actually correct the bug, and three months just to reduce the occurance of the bug.
Needless to say, my experience with VIA is that their tech support is just a bunch of liars and their engineers are just a bunch of unskilled monkeys.
Maybe they've gotten better since then, but with all of the experience that they should have by now, it's still amazing at how poorly their products perform in comparison to the competition. So why even bother with VIA when other, <i>better</i>, solutions exist? That's how I see it anyway.
<font color=blue><pre>If you don't give me accurate and complete system specs
then I can't give you an accurate and complete answer.</pre><p></font color=blue>