funny all of its competitors boards cost what 4X as much sometime 5X or 6X as much?
Not really. I'm assuming you are referring to the low end market, I mean this is VIA we are talking about. You can pick up a cheapo nForce4 socket 754 based motherboard for about $20 nowadays and it will pretty much outperform anything VIA can throw at it in similar price-range and feature-wise.
VIA's chipset offerings are as of 2008 simply outmatched and way behind what their competitors are offering. UniChrome is no match for IGP solutions offered by ATI or nVidia. Their primary and overused south bridge offering, VT8237, is nearly 5 years old at its core with occasional "catch-up" refreshes over the years and it is woefully lacking by modern standards. VT8251 is no better. On the Intel front they are doing little better, their north-bridge offerings are inadequate and antiquated when compared similar Intel offerings. But then again, comparing 5 year old VIA and Intel tech is hilarious, considering where Intel was 5 years ago. I guess it goes to show how Intel has indeed progressed. VIA’s xxx8xx chipsets are ancient considering what AMD, Intel, and nVidia are producing nowadays, and xxx900 lineup was a textbook example of too little too late.
Also, I noticed people refuse to mention their CPU lineup, if it can be even called that. Their core architecture hasn't changed in over half a decade, with occasional refreshes over the years purely for marketing purposes and to keep the shareholders from panicking. Having your "latest" CPU get beat by a nearly decade old Celeron half the Mhz count is pretty embarrassing. Their latest EPIA offerings are simply inadequate and overpriced, although this has more to do with nVidia and AMD under pricing their stuff than anything. As far as desktop and laptop market is concerned, largely they IS dun. Their 2007 roadmap promised much, but little of it materialized, again an obvious and desperate signal.
I can’t see anyone buying a VIA product unless they are looking for something extremely low-power where VIA's EPIA offerings certainly fall into this category, but even then they are simply inadequate and lack the raw power for any sort of modern HD HTPC machine. So, only thing I can think of is either firewalls or tiny file servers, or some third-option specialty setups but even then I can think of several better and cheaper alternatives. Also, if you are able to get their older desktop tech for cheap, and you should be by now, then I recommend it. But buying a $25 dollar VIA based motherboard, with 5+ year old tech onboard and then pairing it up with a $300 CPU from AMD or Intel is simply effing dumb. I mean seriously?
Glory days of KT266A and similar VIA products are long gone. This latest internal merger only highlights this.