X-bit labs

SiS655 - New Dual-Channel Chipset. Gigabyte GA-8SQ800 Ultra – First SiS655 Based Mainboard (page 6)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Next we tested SiS655 in gaming benchmarks. First we used 3DMark2003, which shows performance of the platforms in 3D games of tomorrow.

SiS655 with DDR400 and DDR333 SDRAM, Intel E7205 and i850 show similar results in this test. If we exclude the graphics subsystem workload and have a “pure” mainboard performance, we will have the following picture:

The ratings in the diagram are calculated by benchmarking the system at software vertex processing. As we see, SiS655 is far from best here. The first place goes to i850 working with PC1066 RDRAM.

Seems like i850E remains the best choice for game platforms. It won Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Still, SiS655 is faster here than any DDR SDRAM chipset from Intel.

Intel chipsets win Unreal Tournament, too. And here both Intel E7205 and i850 prove very strong.

Then, we tested the chipsets in SPECviewperf 7.0. It measures the system performance in typical professional OpenGL applications. These benchmarks suit well for comparison of different chipsets, as their results are greatly dependant on effective CPU-memory communication.

In this class of applications (professional OpenGL), SiS655 shows rather average performance. So, the new SiS chipset is not the one to be used in workstations, the solutions from Intel will might a better choice in this case.

Conclusion

Once again SiS launches a successful product for Pentium 4 platform. From this point of view, SiS655 is a worthy successor to SiS648 and SiS645DX. Combining a rich feature set, Hyper-Threading support and dual-channel memory access mode, SiS655 can outperform chipsets from Intel in a number of applications. On the other hand, there are still things to be improved. SiS655 was slower than expected in modern games and professional OpenGL applications.

Anyway, the strongest point of chipsets from SiS has always been an affordable price. Now, you can count out about $200 and buy an E7025 based mainboard, or you can purchase an analogous SiS655 based product for about $140.

We should also remind you that SiS655 might have a short lifecycle. Intel is going to use its new CPUs with the 800MHz bus and it’s still not clear about the support of this bus in SiS655. Anyway, if you are choosing a Pentium 4 platform today, we advise you thoroughly consider SiS655.