Well, you gamble everytime you get a Via...plain and simple. Do you want to record or troubleshoot? That's the main question. Get yourself an Athlon board with ONLY AMD CHIPSETS and you should be just fine.
Either that or go with an all Intel system and be totallys ecure in the mind that it WILL work!
HTH
Opus

Yo man...
thx again for the reply
Well.. that´s for a friend of mine....
he wanna record anyway...
this machine is for recording/mixing/editing/burnCDs

Do u recomend a P4 with Intel Chipset instead of a Athlon with VIA ???? Why via is so problematic ??i have my machine here at home and do some Audio work ( mixing, editing ) and never had problems with that....

Cheers.. and happy new year. > :)
PG

Hey ,pgstudio, I bought one of those Guillemot cards when they first came out.
The VIAchipset will never work well with it. Stick to an Intel solution, as OPUS said. Also, Maxi-Studio Isis will never work with any operating system beyond Windows98 because of the dedicated Dream chip on the PC card. Drivers cannot be written to support realtime OS's like Win2000 or XP. If you go to the Guillemot support site, they have an exit statement. To its merit, card is very musical sounding and has dual Burr-Brown converters.
Again, the card is limited to Win98 only.

Bad news mann...
but thx a lot for your reply..... :)

Cheers..
PG

Via is bad because of their chipset programming goes against the motorolla chipset protocol in which all audio cards are primarily based on...since Via goes against this there are issues with them working with it. That's why Intel and AMD are the way to go for chipsets.
Opus

Opus is dead-on about using AMD chipsets with Athlon CPUs for DAW computers. However, you're very limited. If you do your homework thoroughly, you'll find out that the only wise choice is to use Tyan motherboards. ALL of the AMD-chipset-based motherboards made by other companies, INCLUDING ASUS, have major shortcomings and technological drawbacks. The only way to ensure an excellent Athlon-based DAW machine is to lay down some major cash on a good AMD-chipset Tyan. PERIOD!

Watch out for Tyan mobo's though! They're not too reliable and if you want a good set up with them make sure you folow their RAM and Power Supply guide lines to the teeth.
Opus

if you want a good set up with them make sure you folow their RAM and Power Supply guide lines to the teeth.

Yup, and it's that way with any and all Athlon mobos. ALSO, even all of a company's recommendations aren't always good! Before you make your purchases, visit forums where people are discussing the particular mobo you intend to buy, and see what memory and power supplies they are having the best success with. If a company recommends 20 different items, there may be only a few that work GOOD.
Athlon machines can be tricky to build. Finding the right combination of components to play nicely together can be quite frustrating. But once you get the "magic combination", they really pack a punch.
Then again, if you want to avoid this stuff, go the P4 route and your compatibility issues will shrink considerably. Athlon-building is not for the faint-of-heart, but they're great machines if done right.