Are Via sound chips good?

[Sasquach]

WEll my friend was having mad issues with his computer and it seems to continue on well after we got some new parts for him.

Here's the jist of it:

His old computer was causing problems, ranging from internet to what appears to be incompatibility to constant crashing and rebooting.
His previous setup is as follows to the best of my knowledge:
-Amd Athlon 64 X2 4200+
-Nvidia 500 or 700 series chipset (i cant remember)
-2 seagate drives (one 320gb 7200.10 drive, another 500gb 7200.11 drive)
-2 gb of DDR2 ram
-i believe onboard sound and networking.
-Nvidia Geforce 7900GT

So he got fed up and decided he may aswell get a new PC cuz he eventually had to replace several components (It started off when his computer would NOT boot when we had a LAN cable connected.......and it fired up when it was disconnected ...it lead to us finding out his 500watt Antec PSU had a dead fan for who knows how long its been dead, and it just kinda snowballed from there. Coincidentally i had actualy purchased a new PSU that same day.....).

So now he has:
-AMD Phenom2 X4 945 95w
-Asus MA785VD-T EVO mainboard. (He wanted the same mainboard as mine since i had my computer put togther and running flawlessly but it just wasnt meant to be as my mainboard was sold out the day he decided to purchase his new stuff)
-onboard VIA 1708S soundchip
-Onboard Realtek networking
-Onboard Radeon HD4200 disabled, the 7900GT being used
-His two hard drives being used (as well as his DVD drive)
-750watt Corsair PSU

Everything SEEMS fine for awhile since we've determine some of his internet issues actually appears to be ISP related. But now hes telling me his computer reboots randomly at times. We suspected an overheating issue since thats usually a cause for random reboots, but he did something in windows (He's got WinXP Home) which displayed a BSOD for the inevetiable crash. When he was reading me the BSOD information (which i dunno whwat the hell it means honestly...) something caught my attention as he came across a VIAHDsomething.sys in the message. This led me to believe the VIA HD Audio drivers is causing some instability issues.
I decided to do some quick research and found out that VIA apparently still sucks when it comes to hardware and drivers so this lead me to ask this.
Are VIA soundchips any good? hes gonna download the latest drivers and see if it'll make the reboots go away.

[efin]

WTF Who forgot to shovel the dirt on VIA's grave???

Well, I can't speak from experience with their audio chips (didn't even think they were still around), but I would assume it has more to do with the drivers than the hardware. Updating them is definitely a good idea. While he's at it, tell him to turn off automatic restarts. That might help a bit.

[Gator]

I have two friends with Phenom systems and VIA built-in audio. Neither has reported BSOD issues and one of them regularly plays games. However they are both running Vista64, so I wonder if your friend would have better luck with an OS upgrade. If you wanna try it you can still register a Windows 7 evaluation serial number from Microsoft, and hopefully you already downloaded the disc image. I recommend trying 64bit as well.

I too would be suspicious of the VIA driver given what you mentioned. Are you able to replicate a BSOD pretty easily? Another thing you could try is disabling the driver to see if it helps with stability. If a driver update doesn't help, and you're sure it's the audio, then I might be inclined to get a new audio card. But again, try to the driver and OS options first. XP 32bit is getting up there in age anyway

[caveman-jim]

I've not had good luck with Via sound, but abandoned it before it left the 'AC 97 era; newer HD audio should be better... but y'know.

Like Gator says - easy to test; go into device manager and disable the driver, or disable the audio in the BIOS. If you're not on the latest version of the driver then definately update.

[theshadowcult]

It all depends on each individual motherboard, VIA don't seem to get it right everytime, even on mobos of the same model. However you can get goode HD versions of the realtek sound these days.

[Sasquach]

I actually thought the motherboard used a Realtek chip like mine but after the driver was installed off the CD some wierd looking HD audio control panel showed up and thats when i found out the sound was VIA based.

[Dr. Zhivago]

Yeah, their audio solutions are pretty horrible. But, I'll chime in and say try updated drivers.

[cmar]

VIA Vinyl HD audio cards were pretty good technically. I must admit I've not had a lot of success with VIA drivers for anything.