Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Well, I’m back from Bible study (I was teaching on one of those things that can change your life, so I put all kinds of pressure on myself, and I have no idea whether I delivered), but we won’t talk about that right now. No surprises on the Daynotes circuit today; the Weblogs circuit is mostly talking about Kaycee still. I think I’m done with that. I haven’t had time (or will) to go do the cable re-routing necessary to get my new Duron-700 working perfectly.
So, what to talk about…?
How about DDR chipsets?
VIA makes more DDR chipsets than anyone else, and they’ve surprised everyone during the past 18 months, producing chipsets that were much better than anyone expected while Intel produced chipset after chipset that was, for the most part, far worse than anyone’s come to expect of them. Current Intel chipsets work, but they’ve yet to deliver a truly worthy successor to the classic BX chipset. But so far, VIA’s DDR chipsets so far have been disappointing, which makes me wonder if inability to follow up is contagious.
AMD makes a pretty good DDR chipset–at least it gives better performance than PC133 SDRAM, unlike ALi’s DDR chipset and VIA’s DDR chipsets most of the time, and, to be fair, unlike Rambus chipsets–but finding a motherboard based on it can be difficult. AMD’s not very interested in producing the 760, and it shows.
So what’s the DDR chipset to get for AMD CPUs?
Right now, it’s the AMD 760. But very soon, it looks like it’ll be the SiS 735.
Yes, I know, it sounds like I’ve been smoking crack. SiS has a well-deserved reputation for making underachieving chipsets. Just ask Steve DeLassus what he thinks of his SiS 530 integrated video. He’ll throw an Okidata 180 printer at you (ouch) and then tell you it’s almost as bad as the service you get from GPS Computer Services, that’s what.
And the SiS 735 probably isn’t ready for release just yet, as the problems discussed in this review seem to indicate–though whether the problem is with the chipset, the prototype board, or the BIOS, who knows. But the benchmarks indicate the SiS 735 is about 5 percent faster than the AMD 760-based FIC AD11 while costing much less.
Yes, the AD11 isn’t the best-performing 760 board out there, but then again, prototypes aren’t known for stellar performance either. So this sounds promising. Based on these results, it would seem that an Asus or an Abit could produce a very nice-performing board with the SiS735. And as for SiS’s ability to produce a good chipset? Well, these are strange times. Two years ago, AMD bet the company on the Athlon. They had a new, expensive fab they couldn’t afford, dwindling market share and reputation, and a history of botching product releases. If they did everything right and Intel did everything wrong, they had a chance of surviving. Well, AMD executed while Intel fumbled and fumbled. And VIA executed. Intel got caught off guard, and while they’re still king of the hill, they’re embarrassed.
And there was a time, about five or six years ago, when SiS chipsets were actually very sought after. SiS was the first company to produce a chipset that truly brought out the best in Cyrix CPUs, and people who were concerned with raw applications performance sought them out, because the SiS/Cyrix combination outperformed anything Intel was making at the time.
Can SiS rise again? Maybe. It looks like we’re about to find out.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
First post
People complain about SiS stuff all the time, but they rule the low end.
For example, where I come from, you can’t get a PCI card unless it
s a SiS 6326 8 megger. And they work OK in Linux, so I’m not complaining.
And when (through shocking but temporary ignorance on my part) I paired an AMD 400 with a PC Chips motherboard with an SiS 530 video chipset, nothing but problems. Couldn’t even get it to run at 400mhz.
Change the CPU to a last-in-stock Cyrix 300 MII though, and that same motherboard has given no problems since. Ran Linux like a champ. My mom has it now, and it’s pretty glitch-free.
So if they get a nice new chipset and it works well, more power to them.
I wonder if the AMD/SiS problem was a BIOS issue. But SiS chipsets and Cyrix CPUs did always get along really well.
Part of SiS’s problem, no doubt, is due to PC Chips using their chipsets. An association with PC Chips is enough to tarnish any reputation, which makes me wonder why I’m mentioning them by name. It might rub off on me.
I got nothing to lose mentioning PC Chips given I have already been infected, got one in my house as we speak. Honestly I hate it, and then again I love it. The only thing I can really complain about PC Chips is that there is no support, no documentation, nothing to ever help you. It runs pretty well, if I leave it alone, but I still can’t get the AGP to work — Can’t find any way of assuring myself that the AGP multiplier is set properly though, and thats what I suspect the problem is. Anyway onto SIS735 — I’m all there man, hand it over and I’ll replace my Abit BX board quicker than you can say AMD761!!!!!!
Hi,
I am currently trying to upgrade the graphics on my old computer and am having some difficulties. I currenly have a AMD-K6 3D processor with a sis 530 chipset – I think. I am trying to replace the intergrated graphics with a nVideo gforce4 mx440 pci card. Problem is when I insert it into one of the pci slots the computer won’t even boot up.
Any suggestions.
Thanks in advance
Noel