The recent Contemporary Socket A Chipsets Comparison carried out in our testlab showed that one of the today's fastest chipsets is the one from Taiwanese SiS Company - SiS 735. Since then another Taiwanese manufacturer, VIA, has launched an enhanced version of its VIA KT266 DDR Socket A chipset (the newcomer is known as VIA KT266A). Thanks to an enhanced system of memory requests buffering and an optimized DDR SDRAM controller, VIA KT266A contrived to overrun SiS 735 (See our VIA KT266A Chipset Review). But even despite this fact, SiS 735 still boasts some indisputable advantages over the new VIA KT266A. Firstly, SiS has been shipping this solution in mass quantities for quite a long time now and SiS 735 based mainboards are already in stock, so that everyone can buy them. As for VIA KT266A, we cannot say the same thing about it so far. Although many mainboard makers have already included products based on this VIA core logic in their manufacturing plans, there are no VIA KT266A mainboards available yet. Secondly, SiS 735 is tangibly cheaper than its competitor or any other chipset of the sort. Therefore, mainboards on SiS 735 are not so costly as any other solutions built on other chipsets. There is one more fact making SiS 735 based mainboards cheaper: SiS 735 comprises only one chip combining both the North and South Bridges. It undoubtedly reduces the PCB costs and tells positively on the price of the end products. This way even after the arrival of VIA KT266A based mainboards being a bit faster than those on SiS 735, the latter will retain its popularity due to lower price. In fact, SiS 735 was initially positioned as a core logic for low-cost Socket A systems supporting DDR SDRAM. As for its success as the today's fastest Socket A solution, it appears absolutely logical and the competitors should blame themselves for having turned unable to create Socket A chipsets with duly fast memory controllers from the very beginning.

Now that we have pointed out the highs of SiS 735, we cannot keep silent about the drawbacks it is not free from, unfortunately. First of all, the mainboard manufacturers complain about irregular and insufficient chipset supplies. In spite of SiS's promises to flood the market with cheap high-performance chipsets in the immediate future, there are only two mainboard makers for the time being producing SiS 735 based products more or less constantly. They are Chaintech with its MicroATX CT-7SID and Elitegroup (ECS) with K7S5A designed in ATX form-factor. The latter is exactly the mainboard we'll spotlight in our today's review. It's noteworthy that at first nearly all the leading mainboard makers believed SiS's noble intentions and contemplated producing mainboards on SiS 735. Among them there were such well-known brands as ASUS, ABIT, MSI and Gigabyte. But as we can witness it today, the hardware shops offer a very scarce choice of SiS 735 based mainboards. We sincerely hope that SiS will manage to improve the situation soon. And in the meanwhile let's take a closer look at one of the available mainboards from Elitegroup - K7S5A.

Closer Look

Elitegroup announced K7S5A a pretty long time ago. Thanks to its long-term partnership with SiS, the company has succeeded to ensure the product's availability. Great job! Here is the product itself with all the key specs:

In addition to the specs, we'd like to call your attention to one important thing. At present many Socket A mainboard makers are about to face a pretty serious problem. The matter is that Athlon and Duron CPUs are currently migrating to the new Palomino core, so the mainboard makers have to make sure that their products will work properly with these processors as well. AMD didn't follow in Intel's footsteps: the new core entails no changes in the functions of the CPU pins. Nevertheless, those mainboard manufacturers, which would like their products to support new processors, should provide a new Palomino-compliant BIOS and a powerful enough power regulator the mainboards are equipped with. ECS has paid due attention to this problem, so K7S5A already supports all Palomino based processors. For instance, this board features a three-phase power regulation circuit made of six transistors. It lets us hope that K7S5A will be able to support even a Palomino with 1.73GHz core clock frequency, which is supposed to consume about 77W, according to the initial guesstimates. We also checked how well this mainboard worked with Athlon MP 1.2GHz (Palomino) CPU and were happy to encounter no troubles whatsoever.

Still, there is one issue about the support of CPUs with heavy heat dissipation, which Elitegroup has overlooked. Some of the ten 1500uF capacitors of the power regulation circuit are located so close to the CPU socket that they appear in the way when massive cooling solutions are installed. Nevertheless, everything is OK for most coolers with heatsinks featuring great height and width dimensions.

Please, keep in mind that Elitegroup positions its K7S5A as a value DDR Socket A solution. For this very reason it lacks most of the features, which have become so popular lately. It offers just a minimal basic set including: a universal AGP 4x slot, five PCI and one AMR slot. No IDE RAID controllers, PCI sound chips, and diagnostics tools are implemented on K7S5A. However, Elitegroup engineers used all the SiS 735 features to the really full extent. Namely, the board supports regular dual-channel AC'97 sound and 10/100 Ethernet (optional).

Though in theory SiS 735 allows implementing up to six USB ports, K7S5A supports only four ports. Note that an additional bracket with another pair of USB ports is not included into the packages that goes with the board.

ECS was apparently determined to expand the application field of this mainboard and equipped it with two pairs of DIMM slots: one for DDR SDRAM, and the other - for the common PC133 SDRAM. As a result, K7S5A supports maximum 1GB of either memory (it's not that much, indeed, but for a mainboard of this price category 1GB is quite enough). When DDR SDRAM was making its first steps in the marketplace, it was a highly popular practice to provide mainboards with slots for both memory types. As the time passed, DDR SDRAM got substantially cheaper, so most manufacturers gave up implementing slots for the common SDRAM memory on their DDR solutions. Elitegroup has nevertheless equipped K7S5A with slots for both these memory types, because the mainboard is supposed to be used for value systems upgrade as well.

Apart from trying to make K7S5A as cheap as possible, ECS engineers did their best to create an utterly easy-to-use product. The outcome is that K7S5A has almost no jumpers and features the simplest BIOS from AMI. So, we were not surprised to find no means of assigning IRQs to PCI slots. As well as to discover that the manual adjustment of asynchronous FSB and memory clocking was available only at 100MHz and 133MHz FSB frequencies, although the chipset supported a complete range of asynchronous clocking. At least it's nice that the BIOS of K7S5A allows adjusting all memory timings.

Speaking about system monitoring, we should point out that in case of ECS K7S5A it is represented by ITE8705 controller. The mainboard controls nine voltages, the rotation speed of two of the three coolers connected to the board, and two temperatures.

Unfortunately, the design of K7S5A is not absolutely impeccable. The most unpleasant issue was caused exactly by the support of two different memory types. It turned out that there is not enough space to allocate the IDE, FDD and ATX power supply connectors in front of the memory slots, according to the specs. As for the ATX power supply connector, ECS engineers managed to find a successful way-out having moved it over to the right edge of the board, right behind the Socket A. However, the IDE and FDD connectors in their turn appeared almost in the very center of the board - in front of the PCI slots, which is far not the best solution. As a result, the FDD and IDE cables will go through the entire case, thus hampering air circulation and being in the way for full-sized PCI cards. Moreover, the cables themselves should be rather long to fit there.

The last thing we'd like to pinpoint is the outlook of K7S5A. ECS designed it on a black textolite, while the DDR SDRAM slots were made outstandingly blue. The gold-colored chipset heatsink gives this mainboard a stylish look, which makes a pleasant contrast to its really low price.

Overclocking

K7S5A being designed as a very cheap and easy-to-use mainboard, is not intended for CPU overclocking needs. So, it will be a bitter disappointment for overclocking fans: K7S5A boasts no functions for efficient CPU tweaking. It offers no opportunities for Vcore, Vio or CPU multiplier adjustment. The only means of overclocking it possesses is the possibility to set non-standard FSB frequencies (112, 124, 138, 150 and 166MHz). Frankly speaking, compared with other products allowing FSB frequency adjustment with an increment of 1MHz, this overclocking function makes a pretty ironic impression.

At the same time, don't forget that Socket A CPUs can be overclocked without any specific features of the mainboard involved. We mean opening and closing the "Golden Bridges" on the CPU packaging. It goes without saying that this method requires a lot from the user (Ready to take the risks? - Then check this article!).

Nevertheless, we checked how stable our K7S5A is when working at higher system bus frequencies. As a result, our sample appears capable of running stably only with the maximum FSB frequency of 138MHz. The mainboard lost stability at the next stage of 150MHz.

Testbed and Methods

Since ECS K7S5A is not the first SiS 735 based mainboard in our testlab, we won't compare its performance with that of other platforms. To those readers who wonder how fast SiS 735 based mainboards are if compared with boards built on other chipsets, we recommend consulting our recent Contemporary Socket A Chipsets Comparison. During this test session we'll confine ourselves to comparing the performances of K7S5A, a reference board built on SiS 735 and another mainboard on the same chipset, Chaintech 7SID.

We tested in Microsoft Windows 98 SE.

Performance

Before analyzing the benchmark results, we'd like to stress that our ECS K7S5A "guinea pig" revealed outstanding stability. Yet it proved to be extremely sensitive to the quality of the power supply unit. As our tests showed, nearly all the stability problems of K7S5A could be easily settled by replacing the power supply unit with another one of higher quality.

Now let's have a look at the test results. The memory test comes the first:

Office applications:

Gaming applications:

As you can see, the mainboard from Elitegroup demonstrates slightly lower performance than the reference board from SiS. Nonetheless, SiS 735 is notably faster than any other Socket A chipset (see this article). It lets us claim that ECS K7S5A overruns mainboards based on AMD 760 and VIA KT266.

We have also checked the performance of K7S5A with PC133 SDRAM. In order not to encumber the review with charts and commentaries, we won't discuss the results in every detail. In brief, K7S5A falls behind average KT133A mainboards by significant 5-10%.

Conclusion

We have made sure that thanks to SiS 735 core logic, ECS K7S5A mainboard is a high-performance product offered at a low price. It might become a good buy with an excellent price-to-performance ratio. Surely, considering the lack of most popular (especially overclocking) functions, we cannot call this board an "all-in" solution, though the outrageously low price (as low as $65 in some hardware shops) of this DDR mainboard makes us close our eyes to all its drawbacks.

Highs:

• Remarkable performance;
• Low price;
• Integrated LAN controller;
• Stylish outlook.

Lows:

• No CPU overclocking functions;
• Some design drawbacks.