Review: SiS648/963 Chipset

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.

• Intel Pentium4 2266MHz S478 Northwood CPU Northwood B
• SiS648 reference motherboard run in DDR333 and DDR400 modes
• ABIT BD7II-RAID I845E run in DDR354 mode

Common components

• ABIT GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB at stock speeds (250/500)
• 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR333 and 2.5-5-3-3 at DDR400
• 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
• Liteon 16x DVD
• Samcheer 420w PSU
• 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
• Thermaltake S478 cooler

Software

• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• SiS v1.10.03 AGP and IDE drivers
• Intel Application Accelerator drivers
• Detonator XP 29.42 drivers
• Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional
• Pifast v41
• Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
• XMpeg 4.2A DVD encoding, DivX 5.02 CODEC
• 3DMark 2001SE
• Comanche 4 benchmark
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake 3 v1.30

I'll be directly comparing the SiS648 to one of its immediate competition in the form of the ABIT BD7II-R sporting the i845E chipset. Using a little trick, you can force the BD7II-R to run system memory at DDR354 when the CPU is at 133FSB. I'll be adding results from other chipsets later.

I'll be running the SiS648 at both the official DDR33 and unofficial but supported DDR400 memory modes. The one caveat, however, at DDR400 is that I had to weaken the memory timings from 2-5-2-2 to 2.5-5-3-3. No Vmem adjustment on the reference SiS648 ensured that I couldn't use the stricter timings at DDR400.

I ran into no stability issues in testing. One of the stability tasks that I entrusted it with was the encoding of a few of my DVD films into DivX format. It completed 13+ hours of load testing without issue.

DDR400 memory mode was implemented with a suitable setting in BIOS.

Maybe we'll see official DDR400 support in the inevitable SiS648DX ?. When set to 133FSB, the SiS648 reference motherboard slightly overclocked the FSB to 134.89MHz, giving an overall speed of 2293 MHz. The BD7II-R also overclocked the FSB, albeit to a lesser degree to 133.49MHz. Bear this in mind when comparing results.

On to the benchmarks.