by Anna Filatova
08/11/2002 | 11:38 PM
The recently announced SiSR658 chipset aroused wide response in the hardware society. In fact, there is nothing to be surprised at, because this announcement was the first experience of SiS’ in terms of Rambus support implementation. Besides, it has always been only Intel who ever offered RDRAM chipsets. So, no wonder that almost right after the official announcement there appeared the first benchmarks results of the newcomer. In particular this Japanese site managed to test a SiS658R reference board.
The tests were run in system built with Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor, 256MB memory and NVIDIA GeForce3 graphics card. You can check the detailed results following the link above. I in my turn would like to make a few comments of mine here.<%BANNER[article]%>
In the tests measuring the practical memory bandwidth with PC1066 RDRAM SiSR658 fell a little bit behind i850E working with the same memory, having left behind all the others supporting PC800 RDRAM, DDR333 and DDR266 SDRAM. However, in real applications the results shown by the newcomer appeared slightly worse. In SYSmark2002, Quake3 and 3DMark2002, SiSR658 fell behind i850E with PC800 RDRAM and proved to be as fast as i845G with DDR266 SDRAM.
So, the performance of the new SiSR658 failed to make us cloudlessly happy, unfortunately. Running as fast as regular DDR266 systems do, SiSR658 this way questioned its demand in the today’s market. It is logical that more expensive systems with RDRAM should prove faster than those built with cheaper DDR memory. However, in case of the new SiS chipset, we don’t see it happening. On the contrary, a more expensive system in our case appears slower.
In defense of SiS we could say the following. The mentioned above tests were run on a reference board, and later on they may release a new BIOS or a new chipset revision, which will be improved so that to show better performance. Also SiSR658 unlike i850E, for instance, supports 4-bank RDRAM memory, which should be cheaper than the currently offered 32-bank RDRAM. That is why bearing in mind that SiS’ chipsets are cheaper, the systems built on SiSR658 may appear not more expensive than DDR SDRAM ones. So, it is still too early to make the final verdict.