Socket-A Chipset Roundup - August 2001

Final Words

This updated roundup was long overdue, but it has actually arrived with great timing.  We are on the verge of seeing NVIDIA’s nForce debut as a Socket-A platform; and courtesy of increased performance pressure by SiS, VIA will be bringing a new revision of their KT266 chipset to market as well.  While the usual recommendation, “wait if you can” holds true here more than ever, there are some out there that are in the middle of upgrading and need an answer now.

With DDR SDRAM so very cheap and the platforms very affordable and mature as well, it only makes sense for you to pursue a DDR solution for your Socket-A system.  The KT133A chipset has served us well, but at this point there’s very little reason to choose it over the competition.  The SiS 735 works fine as a SDR chipset but then again, there are very few reasons to stick with SDR at this point.

For the most part, the three major DDR chipsets perform within a few percentage points of each other.  You can’t really go wrong with any of them.  But obviously that’s not the answer you’re looking for.  There are a few cases, especially in very stressful circumstances, that the SiS 735 truly flexes its muscle.

We are still investigating exactly what SiS did to give the 735 such dominating performance, but it’s definitely very low-level architectural enhancements that make the 735 the solution it is today. 

The real beauty of the 735 isn’t its performance, especially since you’ll find it quite difficult to notice a performance difference (in most cases) between it and the 760/KT266.  No, the real beauty of the 735 is its price.  The ECS board we used in this review retails for less than $80.  We have seen it places for as low as $65 plus shipping.  This makes the board and the platform the perfect companion for the very low cost Duron and Athlon processors.  For less than $200 you can easily upgrade your system to a Duron on a SiS 735 board with DDR SDRAM courtesy of the very aggressive pricing from AMD, SiS and DDR SDRAM manufacturers such as Crucial. 

Even if nForce is about to hit the streets, with a $65 motherboard it’s not too difficult to ditch it after a few months and not feel too guilty.