SiS 746FX referentiebord aan de tand gevoeld

Bij OCWorkbench is een review verschenen over de onlangs geïntroduceerde SiS 746FX chipset. Deze socket A chipset ondersteund processors met een 333MHz FSB, DDR400 geheugen en AGP 8x. Verder is er een 1GB/sec verbinding aanwezig tussen de north- en southbridge. Het blijkt dat de SiS 746FX prima kan meekomen met de concurrentie. De nForce2 chipset weet gemiddeld gezien betere prestaties neer te zetten, maar VIA's KT400 chipset moet wel in het stof bijten. Ook opvallend zijn de bijzonder goede resultaten in Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002. In de laatste test is de 746FX zelfs 20 procent sneller dan de concurrentie wat waarschijnlijk te danken is aan de IDE-controller:

In our tests, the SiS746FX is a serious contender. From most of the tests, we can see that it has overtaken VIA KT400 as the direct competitor to the nVIDIA nForce2. Although it couldn't take over as the fastest chipset available for the AMD platform, it is definitely a very formidable competitor in the non-3D arena. In fact, SiS 746FX has done a major break through with the Async Memory settings which brings performance level up not down.

In the SiSoft tests, the memory benchmarks could catch up with Dual Channel nForce2 boards but still lacks that little bit. In fact, we are very satisfied with its arithmetic performance which is shown on the benchmarks. The Multimedia and data crunching is also outstanding too considering that the same CPU is used for all tests. When we run SuperPI at Async DDR400, it manages a score of 55s, that is very good. In fact, the most astonishing results were from the Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002 results. They're exceptionally high and it seems that the high performance IDE performance which resulted in the high results.