by Anna Filatova
06/12/2002 | 11:48 PM
Well, well, it is not for nothing that we were very suspicious about the absence of the DDR400 support in the specs of the two announced mainboards on SiS648. However, there is no need to worry. They will return the support of faster DDR400 memory type into the specs list of Pentium 4 chipsets a bit later, when SIS648DX comes out a month later after the launching of SiS648. In other words, SiS seems to have taken the same faulty way of launching "pseudo-new" chipsets, adding new features drop by drop and trying the user’s patience this way.
In fact, the absence of DDR400 support in SiS648 was already discussed in our news in April (see this news story). However, I appeared too naïve thinking that SiS will change its mind and add DDR400 to the specs list of SiS648. Actually, they didn’t have to do anything to announce this feature, because even SiS645DX is known to be unofficially supporting this memory type (see our article called SiS645DX Chipset Review: ASUS P4S533 and DDR400). However, all our hopes were vain: SiS’s desire to increase the revenues won. The ridiculous thing about it is that this decision is most likely to harm SiS rather than to do the company any good. Bearing in mind that the guys are kind of slow when it comes to shifting to new products manufacturing. Even a simple chipset remarking (SiS648 and SiS648DX will actually differ only by the chipset marking) may take a lot of time. However, VIA doesn’t look any better here: its next Pentium 4 chipset aka P4X400 will also differ from the predecessor only by the DDR400 support.<%BANNER[article]%>
To be fair I would like to say that both chipset makers mentioned above have every formal right not to add DDR400 support into their product specs now, because JEDEC industrial committee is not yet planning to make this memory a standard. But who cares about formalities now?