by Anna Filatova
12/23/2001 | 06:17 PM
This week the Japanese hardware retail stores started selling Pentium 4 mainboards built on the chipsets with the integrated graphics core. As a result, SiS650 appeared the first integrated chipset for Pentium 4 to have reached the customers, the end-users. As you remember, this chipset is none other but SiS645 with SiS315 graphics core added to the chipset North Bridge. The first mainboard built on this chipset to start selling appeared Jetway S450L.
This mainboard is designed in MicroATX form-factor, supports Socket478 Pentium 4 processors, features 2 DIMM slots for PC2700/PC2100 DDR SDRAM. Besides, it has an integrated graphics core and 1 AGP 4x slot, 3 PCI and 1 CNR slot, integrated LAN controller. This mainboard ideal for a value Pentium 4 system costs $105.
The curious thing about it is that the user’s manual has a page with the performance benchmarks results for SiS650 and its graphics core compared with those for SiS650 and an external graphics card based on GeForce2 MX200. In both cases the test were run with the DDR266 memory. According to those benchmarks, the system using an external graphics card appears 20%-50% faster in 3D benchmarks than the system using an integrated graphics core.