By now you all know the drill, Intel or AMD
release a new chipset for their processor platform and the
other third party manufacturers, like VIA, NVIDIA, ALi, and
SiS, are soon to follow. This time around we are
talking about the latest release from
Silicon Integrated Systems, with their SiS655FX chipset.
Their latest incarnation is a potent package, challenging
the Intel 865/875 family chipsets in an effort to offer some
competition in both price points and features. SiS
introduced several new features to give the SiS655FX an edge
over the competition, with the most important being the
introduction of HyperStreaming. By maximizing
bus bandwidth between the Northbridge and Southbridge, SiS
aims to improve performance by reducing any bottlenecks
between the two chips. This will allow for better
communication and should result in an improvement with data
transfer, that can be evident in hard drive performance and
other IO performance.
Recently we were presented
with a reference motherboard from SiS to give us a taste of
what the SiS655FX was capable of. So let's get things
started by getting acquainted with what the SiS655FX has to
offer, then we'll size it up against an Intel 865PE based
motherboard, to see how the latest from SiS stacks up.
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Features
of the SiS 655FX Chipset |
Features and Functionality |
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SiS655FX w/SiiS964
SiS964 MuTIOL 1G® Media I/O
- MuTIOL 1G®
Delivering 1GB/s Bandwidth
- Proprietary Interconnect between SiS655FX and
SiS964
- Bi-Directional 16-bit Data Bus at 533MHz Operating
Frequency
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- 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
- PC2001 Compliant
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