SiS755 Reference Board: Athlon64 from SiS
by Wesley Fink on November 23, 2003 11:19 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
A Closer Look at SiS755
SiS755 is compatible with either Athlon64 or Opteron/Athlon64FX. The Reference Board is an Athlon64 board supporting Socket 754 A64 chips. Our reference board combined the 755 Northbridge with the 964 Southbridge, which adds many contemporary features.
While the 755 can also be combined with the older 963L Southbridge — a combination you will see on cheaper solutions — the most competitive features are provided when the 964 is used. The 964 adds SATA RAID, increases USB ports to 8, and adds base code for “Hollywood Audio”-10/100 Ethernet-Modem.
SiS755 Specifications
- SiS Propriety Hyper Streaming Engine Architecture
- “Low Latency” with Single stream
- “Pipelining” and “Concurrent Execution” with Multiple streams
- “Prioritized Channel” with Specific stream
- “Smart flow control” and “Intelligent arbitration” with Smart stream
- Host Interface Controller
- Supports AMD Athlon 64/ Opteron CPUs
- 800/600/400/200 MHz Front-Side Bus
- HyperTransport Technology with 8/16 links support
- HyperTransport Technology up to 1600MT/s bandwidth
- Support AGP 8X Interface
- Support AGP 8X/4X Interface
- Support Enhancements of AGP v3.0 Register Format
- Support Fast Write Transaction
- MuTIOL 1G Delivering 1GB/s Bandwidth
- Proprietary Interconnect between SiS755 and SiS964
- Bi-Directional 16-bit Data Bus
SiS964 MuTIOL 1G® Media I/O
- MuTIOL 1G® Delivering 1GB/s Bandwidth
- Proprietary Interconnect between SiS755 and SiS964
- Bi-Directional 16-bit Data Bus
- USB 2.0/1.1 Host Controller
- One EHCI USB 2.0 Controller and three OHCI USB 1.1 Controllers
- Support Total 8 USB 2.0/1.1 Ports
- Support USB 2.0 High-Speed Device @480 Mb/s Transfer Rates
- Serial ATA Host Controller
- Two independent ports and flexible channel allocation
- Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 Specification
- Support Ultra DMA 150
- Support RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD configuration
- PCI 2.3 Specification Compliance
- Support up to 6 PCI Masters
- Fast Ethernet/Home Networking Controller with MII Interface
- Support 10/100Mb Fast Ethernet or 1/10Mb HomePNA 2.0 with External PHY
- Audio/Modem Controllers with AC'97 Interface
- AC'97 v2.3 Compliant
- Support 6 Channels of AC'97 Speakers Out and v.90 HSP Modem
- Advanced Power Management
- ACPI 2.0 and APM 1.2 Compliant
- Dual IDE Channels with Parallel ATA 133/100/66
- LPC 1.1 Interface
- Integrated RTC
- Integrated Keyboard/PS2 Mouse Controller
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Googer - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
Lets Bench IT!MoronBasher - Saturday, December 6, 2003 - link
I have a sis 746, and 735 and i can't wait for this chipset to come out!!!mason - Thursday, November 27, 2003 - link
Great review!Two things -
1. The SIS reference board is almost always the fastest performing board with that particular chipset. I think it's premature to label it a winner until you can find a decent performing production board.
2. SIS has been making great chipsets for the Athlon since the 735, only no one knew about them because they typically ran second to VIA in memory banddwidth, which was what all the major review sites cared about. The HDD performance and overclocking headroom on the 735 and 745 both outclassed the VIA boards (KT266, KT266A, KT333) of the day, but they were hard to find and few manufacturers made anything better than cut-rate boards.
The MSI 745 Ultra and the Leadtek 735 board were possibly the best of the early generation SIS athlon boards.
The current SIS748 chipset for the athlon 400FSB is actually very good, though again slightly slower than the KT600 is memory bandwidth.
I just wish major sites would review the few boards that do use these chipsets, so we could start seeing higher quality boards like the DFI 748.
destaccado - Thursday, November 27, 2003 - link
buy now.....asus k8v is an awesome board, in 2 months you might as well wait another two months, and another.....jeeptreker - Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - link
Purchase timing is my concern. I'm considering the AMD 64 3200+ & the Chaintech ZNF-150 w/ nForce3-150 chipset for Christmas. Am I on the edge of a change? If I wait a month or 2 will the AMD 64 3400+ and SIS755 or nForce3-250 chipsets be out? If these items won't be out for 6 mos. then I'll just be chasing technology.Buy now or wait? Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Gimpus - Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - link
When should we expect motherboards based on the SiS755 chipset to reach retail chanels?NFS4 - Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - link
I'll wait til I see the performance of shipping boards before I jump ship...reference boards tend to be "tweaked" in some case. I'm currently lovin' my VIA K8T800 based Asus K8V Deluxe.justly - Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - link
"To our surprise, SiS755 also provided the best performance in AnandTech benchmarks of any Athlon64 chipset that we have tested."Did this realy surprise Anandtech? it didn't surprise me.
For quite some time SiS southbridge chips have proven to be well designed, in fact whenever disk preformance was tested SiS has had some of the best scores. The main problem SiS has had in the past was with the performance of their memory controller. So it would only make sence that when the memory controller is no longer a concern, as it is with the Athlon 64, SiS would be able to show of its southbridge performance.
Other than your surprise about the performance I thought it was a good article. I hope Anandtech doesn't ignore future SiS (or ALi) AMD solutions like it has in the past with socket "A".
Pumpkinierre - Monday, November 24, 2003 - link
I noticed your description of the erratic booting/stability behavior when overclocking which is similar to overclocking problems described in the ipkonfig article-today's AT news post:http://www.ipkonfig.com/Articles/AMDCastrated/Page... .Is this due to data corruption in the HT link as a result of CPU speed being linked to the HT link speed?
HammerFan - Monday, November 24, 2003 - link
I think performance will be influenced most by how "streamlined" everything in the chipset is (i.e. IDE drivers at maximum performance, things such as LAN and RAID taken off of the PCI bus and put on the Southbridge).