Also read the follow up to this report: PC/97 and the PA-2007
A couple of customers have contacted us in the last few days with questions about whether we are selling the PC97 compliant PA-2007 or the ‘older’ revision. At first we were confused and responded that we are aware of only one revision currently selling.
The confusion is the result of either errors or possible misleading information on at least one vendor’s website, and an apparent error on VIA’s website. The vendor specifically mentioned to us is advertising an FIC PA-20071 which uses the VIA VP2/97 chipset. To the best of our knowledge, there is no VP2/97 chipset, but when we checked VIAs website – sure enough, there it was! In looking closer, we also noticed that there is no mention of the VIA VP2 chipset that we are familiar with.
The final confirmation that there is only a single version of the PA-2007 came in a response from VIA to one of our customers who took it upon himself to investigate this (being somewhat of a skeptical person apparently). Following is the response (vendor’s name removed)
The P/N# that you see from ****** is their own. They added “1” after our “pa-2007” to designtae the board with 1MB of L2 cache. We have been selling the PA-2007 with both 512KB & 1MB of cache and that is the reason ****** was doing this. Again, it is ******’s own P/N#. PA-2007 uses VP2 chipset and there is no VP2/97. I guess it’s another description from ****** too. Please ask ****** about VP2/97 and I would like to hear the story too.
Anyway, the PA-2007 you see on Tom’s page is the PA-2007 that we sell here and that’s the PA-2007 ****** should have. (Unless they are buying somebody else’s board and give it a P/N# that is so similar to ours, which I do not think it’s possible).
Thanks,
We believe that the vendor in question may simply have seen the VP2/97 chipset information on the VIA website and updated their description. We also believe that they used the part number in question as a way of differentiating their 1MB board from the 512k board that may be offered by other vendors.
We do also believe, however, that the information is misleading at best, since we have received a few questions about it. Please be aware that all vendors are selling the same revision of the PA-2007, and that the only two variations are the amount of cache on board
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