You may start mocking at us, but one more Elitegroup mainboard announcement revealed the details of another chipset and hence was singled out in a separate news story. We mean the launching of P6STMT mainboard based on SiS630ET chipset, which hasn’t yet been mentioned in the SiS product range. As you can easily guess, SiS630ET is a modified version of another chipset, SiS630E (to be more precise it is SiS630S, because it supports ATA/100 and SiS630E – doesn’t). The list of modifications made includes only one single item: the support of Socket370 CPUs on 0.13micron Tualatin core.
Note that there is a great lot of the so called pseudo-new chipsets, which owe their birth to a small trick of Intel’s: Intel 815 and Intel 810 B-step, VIA 133T and VIA Apollo Pro266T, SiS633T, 635T and now even 630ET! However, all these chipsets do not differ that greatly from the predecessors, except for the “T” and “B-step” suffixes. It’s a great pity…
And now it’s high time we passed over to the mainboard specifications. As you may have already guessed there isn’t anything extraordinary about this mainboard. It is designed in MicroATX form-factor, features 2 DIMM slots for up to 1GB PC133/PC100 SDRAM, 3 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot and 1 AMR slot. The mainboard boasts an integrated graphics core (no AGP slot is supported), AC’97 sound, and optional 10/100 Ethernet controller. In general, it is nearly a complete copy of the P6IWM (see this news story for details) though selling at a different price. All the chipsets belonging to SiS630 family cost about $15-$17 in wholesale quantities, which lets us hope that P6STMT will be selling at some $60.