Recommendations
The recommendations which I made last time are still valid. After reading my comments and after a short look at the benchmark results, it's not surprising that I recommend both the Soyo SY-6VCA and the ABit VT6X4 as well. Soyo is able to provide excellent performance, being now the fastest VIA Slot-1 motherboard for Windows NT 4.0. Nevertheless, the Asus P3V4X is still slightly faster in Windows 98, Expendable and Quake III Arena. I didn't face any stability issues during my test runs.
ABit did excellent work as well. The VT6X4's performance is good enough to achieve upper class benchmark results. I found it interesting that this board was able to get the third place in the SYSmark runs, but just sixth place regarding the two gaming benchmarks.
Conclusion
I think you can imagine what I thought after finishing my tests: "Hey, that was great!" I got no problems and excellent performance. There are certainly a lot of people out there who still are a bit sceptical towards VIA platforms. Looking back into the last years, such an opinion may be well-founded. Driver issues and performance deficits have been VIAs companions for a long time, but recently VIA has improved a whole lot. Admittedly, even today there's still some trouble: Some days ago, we published a short article showing some issues between Windows 2000 and VIA KX133.
Nevertheless, VIA is heading into the right direction. The KX133 issue shows that they are doing small steps, but the improvement is noticable and problems get solved. Boards like the ABit VT6X4 and Soyo's SY-6VCA show once again that products using a VIA chipset can be absolutely problem-free - just as what Intel-based products used to be known for... some time ago ... ?
