SiS655 Based Mainboard from Gigabyte

by Anton Shilov
01/02/2003 | 10:03 AM

The fourth company prepares to formally announce the SiS655-based mainboard. As I learnt over Clubic web-site, Gigabyte Technology will unveil their GA-8SQ800 mainboard shortly. The product is a very advanced and definitely offers high performance and a lot of additional features. Take a look:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• SiS655 chipset, including SiS963 South-Bridge;
• 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC2100, PC2700 (533MHz FSB) DDR-SDRAM and even DDR400 memory. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs.
• 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports (controller from High Point);
• ATA-133 RAID controller from Promise;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• FireWire (IEEE1394) support;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek (1Gb/s LAN - optional);
• 6-channel AC’97 audio solution;
• Lots of additional functions, including the latest introduced by Gigabyte Technology;
• Overclocking functions,
• ATX Form Factor.

There is no word about price and availability, but it seems that the GA-8SQ800 will not be very cheap because according to this picture it utilises 6-layer PCB (when 2 memory channels are implemented on a 4-layer PCB, a pair of memory slots are perpendicular to another pair) and should be a bit more expensive compared to another offerings on the same chipset but made using 4-layer PCB (see this news-story).

Keep in mind that current revision of the SiS655 does not support the Hyper-Threading technology and there is no official word about its support in future revisions (see this news-story). All in all, if you happen to purchase a SiS655-based mainboard, keep your eyes open and be informed.

PS. Pay attention to the fact that now Gigabyte adds “800” suffix to the brand-names of its mainboard, while on the previous lineup they used “667” suffix, alluding the 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus support (see this news-story). Do they want to say that now mainboards from Gigabyte are able to work with the upcoming Pentium 4 CPUs with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus?