by Anna Filatova
01/16/2002 | 10:16 AM
The unannounced competition between the chipset manufacturers for the opportunity to become the first to start shipping Socket A chipsets supporting DDR333 keeps going. At the moment, the leadership belongs to SiS. While VIA hasn’t even launched its KT333, which should appear in the first mainboards some time in February, SiS745 based mainboards have already started selling in retail hardware stores.
For instance, this German on-line store (special thanks for the link to Udo from 3D Now Galaxy) started accepting orders for Elitegroup K7S6A mainboard based on SiS745 chipset. The board is selling there for around $88, which looks very attractive against the background of other DDR266 mainboards.
Although there is a message on the price list saying: "Now sold out. More boards to come soon", the mere fact that the board is there means that SiS has every chance to become pretty popular in the Socket A chipset market due to the fact that they were the first to launch their DDR333 product for this platform.
Here are the specs of the first DDR333 Socket A mainboard from Elitegroup (K7S6A) for your reference: SiS745 chipset, 3 DDR DIMM slots for PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, 1 AGP 4x, 5 PCI, 1 CNR slot, 4 USB ports, AC’97 sound.