Overall, we have nothing extraordinary here, but do have everything necessary. There is nothing really remarkable about the South Bridge, too, but it also supports nearly all modern «must-haves». It doesn’t support SerialATA, but it is in fact of no importance here. Just look at this features list:

• USB 2.0 controller supports up to six ports (in our case, four external ones and two card-readers on the internal ports);
• IEEE1394 controller supports up to three ports (two implemented in our device);
• IDE controller supporta two ATA33/66/100/133 channels (up to four devices totally supported);
• Integrated six-channel audio;
• Integrated modem;
• Integrated 10/100MB LAN.

And here are the same things shown on a schematic picture:

In short, this is an ordinary last-year Pentium 4 chipset. It is of course less powerful than i875 or even i865, but this is not very critical for a barebone system.

Video

Now, let’s add a few words about the graphics core integrated into the chipset. It is called SiS 315 and I doubt many of you remember it :). So, here is a brief summary of the key features from the SiS 315 specs:

• Maximum core frequency is 166MHz;
• AGP 4x support;
• FSAA support (Supersampling);
• Rendering of two textures per clock cycle;
• Support of SDRAM and DDR SDRAM with a frequency of up to 166MHz;
• Memory bus (theoretically) is 128bit wide;
• DVD video motion compensation;
• 375MHz RAMDAC;
• SiS 301 coprocessor may be used for outputting the signal to the second display and/or TV-set.

Briefly, this graphics chip was once competing with the well-known GeForce2 MX200 and in fact it was a worthy competitor due to its wider memory bus (compare with the 64bit bus in GeForce2 MX200) and the above-mentioned SiS 301 coprocessor, which was installed on 99% of all SiS315 based cards. Thus, the cards were quite fast-performing and with a number of outputs.

However, this was back in 2001. Moreover, in the present case, SiS 315 lost its two trumps because of the integration into the system chipset. The memory bus is only 64bit wide now (as they use PC2100/PC2700), while SiS 301 is, of course, missing. Two drawbacks were also added: the graphics core works at 133MHz only (the North Bridge frequency), while indirect work with the memory results in various unpleasant latencies. The last nail into the lid of the coffin: the shared memory architecture, as usual, undercuts the performance of the main RAM - you will see it clearly in the fourth part of this review.

Thus, we have a graphics chip with a 2x1 pipeline formula (i.e. it will be even slower during multi-texturing), working at a frequency of 133MHz, with only one RAMDAC and slow 133/166MHz DDR SDRAM across a 64-bit bus. The memory bandwidth is only 2-2.5GB/s, theoretically. In reality, there will be numerous latencies to drive this theoretical speed down. Moreover, this graphics chip kills some of the main system performance.

So, the graphics subsystem of the MEGA system made a somewhat gloomy impression. We will have it benchmarked soon, so be patient.

I guess no one really needs a description of the Pentium 4 processor, do you?  So, we go right over to the computer itself.