Archive for May, 2008

VIA KT600 chipset and PCI Wireless card experiences

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Seems VIA’s Athlon chipsets, specifically the KT600 in this board, don’t much care for some common PCI wireless chipsets. All of these are actual PCI devices, not on a Cardbus adapter card.

A Broadcom BCM4318 “AirForce” failed even basic PCI configuration; it was detected instead as a Gammagraphx device (0000:0040). Same card works perfectly in a system with nForce3 chipset.

A card with an Atheros chipset worked under light use, but caused random kernel panics under even light NFS traffic while acting as a file server. Under Windows, sporadic hangs were the result. Didn’t check if this one worked in the nForce3 board yet.

Finally after almost giving up, a card based on a Realtek RTL8185 worked correctly and reliably.