PC Hardware has put up a review on the Abit SA6-RAID motherboard

I was a little bit disappointed when Intel failed to provide a successful successor to the king BX. Lately I had the pleasure to test a lot of VIA based boards but serious motherboards with Intel chipset were very rare in our laboratory. Do not understand me wrong, I have nothing against i810 or i815. i810 was a successful chipset for low cost market, highly customizable while i815 tried to repair several issues of i810. The problem is that most manufacturers didn´t even try to force the market with "overclocking made" Intel boards. I loved the way how VIA broke Intel´s monopoly but I do not want to create another giant. Intel is hard to beat, after all it´s a bigger company with interests in many other fields and they can surprise in any moment. From my point of view VIA chipsets were encouraged from the start and most of all media done a great job in promoting them. Do you remember the memory problems? Do you remember drivers incompatibility? Many problems still exist today but users believe in this company. But many manufacturers prefer to go for VIA - better prices, maybe a bigger profit, users support and why not: Intel´s lack of reaction. I don´t think that it´s harder to design Intel based motherboards because I work with Intel datasheets from a while and I know that Intel always provided good documentation (at least for developers). I know almost nothing about VIA datasheets but I am a surprised that many manufacturers neglected i815EP chipset.

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