SiS Introduced 648DX and 746DX

by Anna Filatova
07/31/2002 | 02:45 AM

Again we are returning to the Silicon Valley to tell you about the demonstration of working systems on SiS648DX and SiS746DX chipset from Silicon Integrated Systems, which was held at the Platform Conference. These chipsets are designed for Pentium 4 and Athlon XP platforms respectively, thus being the successors to SiS648 and SiS746.

The new Pentium 4 solution, SiS648DX, is a continuation of SiS648, which officially supports DDR400. Here are its major specs:

• Supports Pentium 4 with 400MHz and 533MHz bus;
• Supports DDR400;
• AGP 3.0, up to 8x modes;
• Enhanced MuTIOL interbridge bus with up to 1GB/sec bandwidth;
• New SiS963 South Bridge;
• ATA/133;
• USB 2.0;
• IEEE 1394a (FireWire).

As for the other chipset, SiS746DX, it is almost identical to SiS648DX in terms of technical specs, with that only exception of course, that it is intended for AMD Athlon and Duron CPUs. We should also recall that the previous product from SiS, SiS745, appeared not very successful in performance as well as in stability. Take a look at any review of SiS745 based mainboards or at the feedback of our visitors they shared in our forums. The diagram below shows all the features of the newcomer in detail:

The slide shows that the new solution from SiS is very rich in different features. So, we can only hope that the company managed to eliminate the drawbacks of the predecessor from their new SiS746DX solution, namely the slow performance in asynchronous mode. So, we expect to see a new worthy alternative to nForce and some solutions from VIA.