<%BANNER[top_768x90]%>

<%BANNER[banner_468x60_h]%>

SiS635 Based Reference Mainboard

by Anna Filatova
01/18/2001 | 08:51 AM

The day before yesterday at the presentation in Japan SiS showed the first mainboard samples based on SiS635. As you remember, SiS635 and SiS735 chipsets announced in December 2000 are the first integrated chipsets with DDR SDRAM support for Intel Pentium III/Celeron and AMD Athlon/Duron CPUs respectively.
The reference board is made in MicroATX form-factor, which isn’t surprising at all since SiS635 is a relatively cheap product ($27) and combines both: the North and the South Bridge in one single chipset. Besides Socket370, there is also an AGP slot for external graphics cards, 1 ACR and 3 PCI slots. Moreover, the mainboard is equipped with 3 DIMM slots for DDR memory. However, the memory controller in SiS635 is quite flexible and the reference design theoretically allows the following three DIMM slots configurations:

3 184-pin DDR DIMM slots;
2 184-pin DDR DIMM slots and 2 168-pin SDR DIMM slots;
3 168-pin SDR DIMM slots.

Besides, we should also point out that SiS635 is SiS’s first chipset, which uses the bus with the bandwidth of 1GB/sec to connect the two bridges.
Everything described above is also valid for the Socket A SiS735 chipset, which differs from SiS635 one only by the processor bus.
Mass production of SiS635 is planned for February, and that of SiS735 – for March. Hopefully, these SiS chipsets will be luckier than their predecessors, which have been enjoying the samples status for half a year already.

<%BANNER[banner_468x60_f]%>