Yup, you can buy VIA branded mainboards over here. I have always assumed that they are outsourced, and further assumed that the actual manufacturer is FIC, simply because VIA and FIC are sister companies, both owned by the Formosa Plastics group, and also becauses VIA boards arrived (at least here in Oz) at about the same time that FIC boards dissapeared off the market. But I have no evidence for that, these are only assumptions.
I've never bought one myself, or even seen one, because they seem to be mainly (only?) for the P4 platform, which doesn't sell in large enough numbers to be significant for us.
In fact, I understand that the P4 market was the entire reason for VIA making boards in the first place: Intel were doing their usual bully tactics thing with anyone who made chipsets, and publicly threatening to sue the pants off any motherboard maker who dared to use a non-Intel product in their boards. Motherboard makers, for all their other virtues, are not generally speaking very brave. They caved into the legal blackmail.
The only way VIA were going to be able to sell their latest product was to make the motherboards themselves. VIA are one of the few firms big enough to stand up to Intel and their batallions of lawyers.
Intel hardly ever win their litigate-on-sight cases: look at the long string of losses they had against Cyrix and AMD. But that, of course, is not the point: they know that only the biggest and the most determined of their competitors have what it takes to stand up against them. Even though the historical record demonstrates that Intel's suits are usually baseless and generally wind up being thrown out of court, no independant motherboard maker can afford the legal costs involved.
Since then, the case has been settled, I gather, and (as usual) on terms that are highly favourable to VIA. So the brand will probably dissappear again before too long, and VIA will just sell chipsets to all the independants, same as usual.
Thanks Coug, I was completely unaware of them being available around here.