SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

As we’ve explained in the past, SYSMark 2000 is a combination of a Business and Content Creation benchmark.  The benchmark runs through a set of 12 application tests ranging from business performance under Microsoft Word to content creation performance under Adobe Photoshop.  SYSMark 2000 only runs a single application test at a time and the suite as a whole is representative of the way some may use their systems provided that multitasking among multiple applications isn’t characteristic of their usage.

Our ALi MAGiK1 platform wouldn’t complete these tests under Windows 2000 so they are left off the chart, however the data we have is enough to see that the 730S’ memory controller is definitely inferior to that found in VIA’s KT133.  The VIA KT133 vs SiS 730S match here is perfect since both are using 100MHz FSB settings and PC133 SDRAM, and in these tests, both setups are using the same GeForce2 GTS graphics accelerator. 

The KT133 is just over 10% faster than the SiS 730S, the only factors that can be attributed to this lead being the disk and/or memory controllers.  Let’s continue with the benchmarks and see if any other clues pop up.