X-bit labs

SiS655 - New Dual-Channel Chipset. Gigabyte GA-8SQ800 Ultra – First SiS655 Based Mainboard (page 5)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/21/2003 | 01:49 AM ]

Now let’s turn to another memory bandwidth test aka, SiSoft Sandra 2003, which uses the well-known Stream algorithm.

SiSoft Sandra indicates that SiS655 with dual-channel DDR333 and DDR400 SDRAM is the best of all. We should note, however, that the peak effective bandwidth of such high-speed memory (its theoretical bandwidth is 5.4 or even 6.4GB/s) can’t reach the theoretical maximum of the CPU bus – 4.2GB/s. This suggests that we shouldn’t expect any considerable performance growth over the dual-channel DDR266 platforms.

But let’s go over from synthetic benchmarks to real applications.

This benchmark is based on business applications (including Lotus Notes R5, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-1, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-1, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-1, Microsoft Access 2002 SP-1, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-1, Microsoft Project 2000, WinZip 8.0, Norton AntiVirus from Symantec and Netscape 6.2.1). SiS655 shows excellent performance here – better than all the competitors from Intel.

We have similar results in multimedia applications (Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 includes Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Premiere 6.0, Macromedia Director 8.5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055, Netscape 6.2.3, NewTek LightWave 7.5 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0). We can only be pleased with SiS. Every new chipset from the company is better than the previous products and competes on equal terms with Intel chipsets.

Dual-channel PC1066 RDRAM i850 was best at zipping files with WinRAR. SiS655 does quite well, too, and outperforms Intel E7205.

Video encoding into MPEG-4 format shows similar picture.

The half-synthetic PCMark2002 once again brings SiS655 to the fore. Due to a combination of high bandwidth and relatively low latency outpaces all its competitors.