Riding the 64-bit Chariot: Choosing Socket 939 and Linux

Conclusions

Although the majority of our benchmarks put the NVIDIA chipset ahead of the VIA chipset in performance, we only saw marginal gains. NVIDIA pulled ahead in the gaming tests, but probably only because NVIDIA drivers are optimized and designed on other NVIDIA hardware. It's probably hard to imagine the NVIDIA Linux engineers spending too much time reworking their Detonator drivers for K8T800. In time, once we have stronger confidence in the ATI driver set for Linux, we will re-evaluate our position for who takes the lead in Linux gaming.

VIA and NVIDIA take two different approaches to designing hardware and drivers. NVIDIA's monolithic driver and chipset design hurts them in our 64-bit evaluation, where SuSE 9.1 Pro would not recognize the integrated Gigabit Ethernet interface. VIA hurts themselves with microdrivers due to the fact that many are old and too platform specific. VIA, on the other hand, does have a bit stronger presence in the Linux kernel, and as a result, there are multiple blanket drivers that get VIA's hardware up and running without much hassle.

All in all, although we would like to say X hardware platform provides a better advantage than Y, after evaluating the two reference boards, we cannot come to a clearcut decision between the two. Since the two architectures were so close, the evaluation of feature set and price become the hinging points for buying your next Linux motherboard.