VIA Beta Windows XP Driver

VIA released a BETA driver patch today to help address some of the problems on AMD based VIA motherboards in WindowsXP. Though users are having mixed results with this patch, here is what our resident scripting guru, George Breese, has to say about the patch:

"This patch detects the 0305, 3099, 3102, and 3112 (KT133x, KT266x, VT8662, and KLE133) *only*. On these chipsets, it will patch register 55 in the Northbridge, which will supposedly switch off a Memory Write Queue timer.

In the KT133A datasheet, register 55 is "reserved". But - yikes! - in the KT266, the documented MWQ register is register 95, not 55. Register 55 contains unrelated DDR timing adjustments and could actually be dangerous to program. For this reason, I do not recommend installing this driver on the KT266x chipsets until VIA examines this issue. For now, use WPCREDIT and set bits 5, 6, and 7 to zero in register 95 instead."

News source: VIA Hardware