Again we have to turn to SiS’ success in the chipset field. As we learned from the company officials, the shipments of the new chipset for Pentium 4 processors, SiS645DX, are about to get started within the coming couple of weeks. Almost all the leading mainboard manufacturers are going to use SiS645DX in their products.

The launching of the new SiS645DX was held at CeBIT and appeared right in time. This way SiS645DX turned out the first product to support officially Pentium 4 with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, which are to be officially announced in the second half of May. Intel is going to announce its first chipset with 533Mhz Quad Pumped Bus support only on May 6, and VIA still hasn’t got the license from Intel.

Boasting almost the best features set, supporting DDR333 memory, 400MHz/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and ATA/133 protocol, SiS645DX managed to win the hearts of many mainboard manufacturers right away. Many of them were really quick in developing their solutions on this chipset. The weekend has brought us some details about three new products on SiS645DX. Here they are:

• ABIT SX7-533. This Socket478 mainboard is equipped with 3 DIMM slots for DDR SDRAM, 6 PCI and 1 AGP 4x slot. The board supports AC’97 sound and has 4 USB 1.1 ports.
• Gigabyte GA-8STX. This Socket478 mainboard is equipped with 3 DIMM slots for DDR memory, 6 PCI and 1 AGP 4x slot. It will also feature an integrated 6-channel Creative CT5880 sound controller and an additional USB 2.0 controller from VIA, which will provide the mainboard with 4 extra USB 2.0 ports. Of course, the solution will support Gigabyte’s brand DualBIOS technology.
• MSI 645E Max2-LRU. This seems to be the solution richest in features. Besides Socket478, 3 DDR DIMM slots, 5 PCI, 1 CNR and 1 AGP 4x slot, the board has an integrated USB 2.0 controller from NEC supporting 4 USB 2.0 ports, ATA/133 RAID controller from Promise and Realtek 8101L LAN controller. The mainboard will also support brand D-Bracket diagnostics technology.

As we see, if the mainboard manufacturers regarded SiS645, the predecessor of SiS645DX, only as a low-cost chipset for Pentium 4 and they tried to make the mainboard based on it as cheap as possible, now the situation has changed a lot. SiS645DX based solutions will boast more interesting featured due to the integrated USB 2.0 or ATA/133 RAID controllers. As a result, the cost of these mainboards will grow higher. And it means that SiS managed to win the reputation of a more serious chipset maker than it used to be considered, and the products on SiS645DX will push their way through the market not only due to low cost.