SiS 748: best socket A chipset?

[pigdos]

I've never personally owned a motherboard using this chipset and I actually
can't even name one motherboard that uses this chipset, but on paper it
looks better than the Nforce2. It supports the same amount and types of
memory as the Nforce2 but features the Mutiol Northbridge/Southbridge
interface which communicates at 1GBps, which I beleive is faster than the
Nforce2 Northbridge/Southbridge communication channel. So was/is it the best
socket A chipset? Anyone ever owned a motherboard using this chipset?

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I've never personally owned a motherboard using this chipset and I actually
can't even name one motherboard that uses this chipset, but on paper it
looks better than the Nforce2. It supports the same amount and types of
memory as the Nforce2 but features the Mutiol Northbridge/Southbridge
interface which communicates at 1GBps, which I beleive is faster than the
Nforce2 Northbridge/Southbridge communication channel. So was/is it the best
socket A chipset? Anyone ever owned a motherboard using this chipset?

No, I owned a couple of motherboards with the SiS 735 Socket A chipset,
which are both still running nowadays.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rthoreau]

No, I owned a couple of motherboards with the SiS 735 Socket A chipset,
which are both still running nowadays.

Yousuf Khan

I have to agree with Yousuf, the SIS 735 was one of the best Socket A
chipsets around. I have owned a SIS 748 as well as a 735, would say
that the 735 has better software driver support. Also the board I owned
was a gigabyte board and I had to RMA it three times. It had bad 5 volt
readings even when I switched out the power supply, got to the point
when I had to junk the board as it was not worth the headache after the
third RMA failure. I had all sorts of drive problems, zip drive would
not run, optical drives would not install software because of the low
voltage. I even wasted a good 5 volt pci to pcmcia controller thinking
that it was bad, when it was the board.

Now saying that I would probably suggest the NF2 board as it will have
better support, not that many manufactures made sis 748 boards. Yes you
can get software from sis, but since more nf2 boards were manufactured
the support will be better.

Rthoreau

 

[Tony Hill]

I've never personally owned a motherboard using this chipset and I actually
can't even name one motherboard that uses this chipset, but on paper it
looks better than the Nforce2. It supports the same amount and types of
memory as the Nforce2 but features the Mutiol Northbridge/Southbridge
interface which communicates at 1GBps, which I beleive is faster than the
Nforce2 Northbridge/Southbridge communication channel.

Marginally so. The nForce2 used Hypertransport between it's two chips
and I believe it had about 800MB/s of total bandwidth on the link. Of
course, this isn't going to make a lick of difference for performance
except under VERY extreme situations (ie a server with gigabit
ethernet and a big RAID setup... hardly a common setup for such
motherboards).

So was/is it the best
socket A chipset? Anyone ever owned a motherboard using this chipset?

They do exist, PC Chips has one, as does Foxconn (might actually be
the same board). I've got an ASRock board using an SiS 741GX chipset
which serves it's purpose, however I find the board to be of lower
quality than the nForce2 Ultra 400 board used in my main desktop.
This is more a reflection of the board itself rather then the chipset
though.

Really that's what it's likely to come down to, the specific
implementation on the board rather then the chipset. A better BIOS
will make a much bigger difference than any possible chipset
differences. Well, that and drivers. I don't know much of anything
about the quality of SiS' Windows drivers since I'm running Linux on
my ASRock board, however nVidia's drivers are pretty good.

Of course, the point is kinda moot at this stage, Socket A has been
discontinued for some time now.

 

[AD.]

Anyone ever owned a motherboard using this chipset?

We've still got a bunch of Gigabyte boards using that chipset. They've
been solid and haven't given us any problems under either Windows or
Linux. But as for comparisons with other chipsets, I can't really say
whether or not they are better than anything else.

 

[tlai909]

I'd say this - I has some USB problems with my old SiS735.

They cleared up all the problems with the later SiS series.

However by that time I was already with Nforce2 MCP which has its own
USB problems.

The SiS won't be available any more as all socket A boards are pretty
much history.

 

[magnate]

I've never personally owned a motherboard using this chipset and I actually
can't even name one motherboard that uses this chipset, but on paper it
looks better than the Nforce2. It supports the same amount and types of
memory as the Nforce2 but features the Mutiol Northbridge/Southbridge
interface which communicates at 1GBps, which I beleive is faster than the
Nforce2 Northbridge/Southbridge communication channel. So was/is it the best
socket A chipset? Anyone ever owned a motherboard using this chipset?

I have an AsRock mobo which uses the Sis748 (K7S8XE+ I think), and an
Asus A7N8X which uses nForce2. The Asus is way faster, though of course
we can't be certain that that's all down to the chipsets - a lot of it
is probably the difference between the vendors.

One thing I will point out though: nForce2 allows dual-channel memory
configuration, so you can have two (interleaved) DIMMs running at
400MHz (DDR), or three non-interleaved at that speed (3Gb max). The
AsRock board only allows one DIMM slot to run at 400MHz - if you use
the other two, they all have to slow down to 333MHz (which is fine if
you're running a 166FSB CPU, but not if you have a 200FSB CPU). I'm not
sure if this is a limitation of the SiS748 chipset or just a
(mis)feature of the AsRock board.

Just my 2p - I'd go with nForce2 (or VIA KT400),

CC