XP and Via Chipsets

[ovoskeuiks]

Just another ask around post. Hopefully this one belongs in this forum
MPV4 chipsets and XP... what can I do to increase the performance of these old things. I happened to be reading along one of whetus articles he pointed me to for another problem and I followed a link about the via latency issues. Now I was under the impression that the latency issues didn't affect older machines but the site was testing on a MPV3. So Will I get a performance increase by installing this.
The Hyperion Drivers V4.49 are these the best to install on XP sp1 for this chipset or is there perhaps an older one that is better suited?
Finally is it worth updating the graphics drivers or would it be easier to stick with the default windows drivers.. bear in mind these are far from games machines mostly just office etc.

Cheers again I'd really love to see these old K6-2's smoking along like I know they can

p.s. NO posts telling me that K6-2's are crap and no posts saying just buy new hardware this is not an option

[Ragnor]

I wouldn't worry about PCI latency unless you have a lot of PCI cards and are having issues with your audio.

Generally speaking it's always a good idea to have the latest drivers installed as they have all fixes and performance tweaks to date. Of course there are certain instances when older driver versions might be faster for a specific piece of hardware or the latest driver might contain a new bug. Usually you can find out that sort of thing on the net.

So yes, I would install the latest Via hyperion v4.49 drivers for your mobo since they've been out for awhile and I haven't heard of any problems with them. The Via drivers are pretty mature and stable thesedays. The Via drivers are unified and cover all via chipsets.

Sticking with the windows driver isn't usually a good idea since they are pretty much a pre the OS actually being released version. There are undoubtably bug fixes and performance tweaks in newer drivers. Also with graphics drivers you'll probably find you need the latest version to play the latest games. eg: When Unreal II was released Nvidia had to release a new driver version to fix a missing textures issue. So installing the latest Direct X and graphics driver for your video card is probably recommended.

[ovoskeuiks]

Cheers ragnor.. I have installed the hyperion driver on the machines i'll be imaging from. It's always hard to tell whether there is any noticable difference but the machine feels quite responsive.
Anyway I had a talk to Viper about the video drivers, he has a little experience with these boards and said the newer drivers fixed an artifact issue but the windows ones were generally faster. Having not experienced any problems with artifacts on the default drivers i've left them on.
The machine only have one PCI card in them, a network card.
These will soon be replaced because half of them are 10mbit cards and the others are possibly the worst 10/100mbit card known to man. I will possibly start a thread about them they are that bad (Cnet 200). They are so f'ing god awful that my netbsd based ghost disk won't even work with them.
gonna go with some generic Realtek network cards... they are fairly well supported by near everything