Nvidia have stated (as I understand it) that they're getting out of the AMD nforce chipset business once AM2 is finished, and that their Intel nforce chipsets are on hold until legal difficulties are overcome.

SIS and Via seem to both be out of the mobo chipset business (personally I say good riddance) too.

That leaves Intel and AMD each producing their own.

I'm not very happy with AMD because their AHCI drivers are still an issue apparently (techreport mention it every time they review an AMD chipset). How are Intel's chipsets going?

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I've almost always been an Intel fanboy. I have had Via, AMD and Nvidia chipsets, and always pretty quickly came back to Intel. I've been running an X58 board for I guess a year or so now, and I've been very happy with them. I've had 2 different boards (just because I do that ) and they've both been very stable, very fast, easy to set up.... So while lack of competition is bad, at least the boards are good.

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My worry is that without nvidia providing some competition on the Intel chipset front, maybe Intel's standards will drop. I think it's an absolute certainty with AMD because they're aiming at the lower half of the market and so they will probably want to cut corners where possible. Perhaps Intel too because of probable competition with AMD in the mid-range.

One thing I find odd is on Slashdot, loads of users are slating nforce boards. I thought that generally speaking they were great, I only had one minor niggle in the last few series which was that they stopped producing IDE and SATA IDE drivers, just going for SATA NCQ. I accepted that though because their boot-up performance was decent in AHCI mode.

My impression of AMD chipsets is that they've always been a bit bollocks (annoying persistent bugs that may or may not affect the average user, and possibly myself when I go to upgrade my machine at some point), and it worries me having to rely on them, though that might change if Intel's s1156 competes with AMD more than it is right now.

Having said that, I would go with AMD rather than SIS or Via, as I've had/seen real problems with SIS/Via, and IMO they're used for a lot of cheapo quality boards that limp to 5 years of age then crap out with leaky capacitors.

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