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ECS Demonstrates SiS655 and VIA K8T400 Based Mainboards

by Anton Shilov
11/21/2002 | 07:32 PM

Elitegroup showcases two its new mainboards at Comdex Fall these days. Both devices are surprisingly not just another cheap solutions from ECS, but offer us a broad range of interesting features and capabilities, as a result, we can expect them to provide high performance as well.

Let us start from the P4S55A mainboard based on the recently announced SiS655 core-logic. <%BANNER[article]%>

SiS655 North Bridge supports Intel Pentium 4 processors with 400/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and can take advantage of the Hyper-Threading technology. The novelty offers dual-channel PC2700 memory controller, providing 5.2GB/s of peak bandwidth, more than the Granite Bay or SiS R658 can provide us today. It should be pointed out that SiS655 is able to work in either 128-bit dual-channel mode or in 64-bit concurrent mode. For the former case, you will have to install either two or four totally identical memory modules, while for the latter configuration, you can install any number of DIMMs you would like. As all the latest North Bridges from SiS, this one supports up to 4GB of DDR SDRAM and AGP 8x as well. SiS655 chipset utilizes SiS’ MuTIOL 1G technology in order to connect the SiS655 North Bridge with SiS963 I/O controller. The SiS963 features the IEEE 1394a high-speed connector, USB 2.0 and Dual Parralel ATA-133/100/66 IDE channels.

Here are the actual technical specifications of the the P4S55A:

Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
SiS655 core-logic with SiS693 I/O controller (pay attention to a radiator installed on it!);
4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC1600, PC2100 or PC2700 DDR-SDRAM memory. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs.
5 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot and 1 AGP 8x slot;
2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
Serial ATA-150 controller from Silicon Image, supporting 2 Serial ATA-150 ports;
USB 2.0 ports;
FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports;
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek;
AC’97 audio solution;
ATX Form Factor.

Although ECS does not indicate when the product is to be available, it is quite clear that the company will try to launch it as soon as possible due to competition with the main rivals from the “Big Four”, who have already announced their dual-channel DDR SDRAM-supporting devices and now start to deliver them to their partners.

Another interesting mainboard will not be here for a quarter, I think, because it is intended for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. The K8VTA is powered by VIA K8T400 Graphics Tunnel and VT8235 South Bridge.

The technical details on the novelty are the following:

Supports Socket 754 Athlon 64 processors with 800MHz HyperTransport interconnection;
VIA K8T400 Graphics Tunnel and VT8235 South Bridge;
2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2700 DDR-SDRAM memory; Memory controller is integrated in the CPU;
5 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot and 1 AGP 8x slot;
2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
Serial ATA-150 controller from Silicon Image, supporting 2 Serial ATA-150 ports;
USB 2.0 ports;
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter (optional);
AC’97 audio solution;
ATX Form Factor.

I remind you that ECS have a lot more mainboards for the Athlon 64 processors in their roadmap (see this news-story).

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