Although SiS746FX has nothing to do with hardware enthusiasts, overclockers and other advanced users, who said that there are no cost-effective Socket A systems at all? Well, I guess no one did. If AMD had managed to launch its x86-64 processors in Fall 2002, the Socket A Athlon XP CPUs would have competed against lower-end Pentium 4 CPUs and Celerons these days and the demand on cheap mainboards would have been higher. But, as we see now, the x86-64 is moved again towards September, while the Athlon XPs have to fight against Intel’s higher-end Pentium 4 models and mainboard makers try to make feature-rich and powerful Socket A products in order to attract attention of the customers, who plan to build powerful PCs on an AMD processor. On the other hand, there are still some guys who want to get a cheap-enough computer that would be able to utilise even the most-powerful AMD Athlon XP 2700+ CPU and there should not be any surprises here (you are not surprised that Intel’s 845GV core-logic supports the Hyper-Threading technology currently found on the $637 Pentium 4 3.06GHz, are you?). So, the SiS746FX mainboard should suit them: the performance difference between chipsets is not really critical when talking about a cheap system, hence, the latest and last SiS’ Socket A baby can find itself as a dominating player on the low-end market segment with DDR400 and AGP 8x support. At least, until VIA lowers the prices on the KT400.

Two more mainboard manufacturers, IWILL and ASRock, recently unveiled their SiS746FX-based mainboards, as said over here. Just as expected, both mainboards are very similar and do not implement any special capabilities.

Here are the technical specifications of IWILL KS2 and ASRock K7S8X:

• Supports all Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron CPUs with 200, 266 and 333MHz FSB;
• SiS746FX chipset with SiS963 I/O Controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for PC2100, PC2700 or DDR400 memory;
• ASRock’s mainboard only supports up to 1GB of DDR400 memory, 2GB of PC2700 memory and up to 3GB of PC2100 memory.
• 5 (6 in terms of ASRock product) PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated ATA/33/66/100/133 controller;
• 10/100/Mbit/s Ethernet Port supported by IWILL KS2;
• USB 2.0 ports;
• Integrated 6-channel AC'97 audio solution;
• ASRock also provides their own Universal CPU Overheating Protection (U-COP)
• ATX form-factor.

As always: no information about pricing and availability.