SiS Back On Stage: The SiS730 Chipset for Duron and Athlon – THG.RU

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SiS To Enter The Top-League Of Chipset-Makers?

For many years the Taiwanese chipset makers weren’t able to compete with Intel’s chipset products in terms of performance as well as success, but lately times have changed. VIA’s tremendous success in 2000 gave ALi and SiS enough hope to come back out of the dark now too. It is not surprising that Intel is not going to threaten its CPU business by providing chipsets for the competiting Duron and Athlon processors. AMD continues to point out that it does not want to become a chipset maker, but merely some kind of technology pointer. Instead, AMD primarily wants to show the chipset makers what an Athlon chipset should look like.

VIA was the first company to proactively supply chipsets for AMD processors, thus being one of the driving forces to establish both AMD processors in the market and themselves as one of the top chipset providers today. Now, more than one year after the time when Athlon’s success was still questionable, ALi and SiS are finally entering the AMD-platform market too. Acer Laboratories has skipped the first two Athlon generations and provides its MaGiK1 chipset with support for DDR SDRAM and the recently announced Athlon processors at 133 MHz FSB. VIA is also working on its DDR chipsets for Athlon (Apollo KT266). The first chipset from Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) is named 730s and can be called a masterpiece of integration. One single BGA chip (672 balls) hosts all functions for which the other companies need at least two chips. This interesting product is most certainly worth a look.

Features Of The SiS 730S Chipset

The feature list is indeed quite long. That is particularly interesting because the 730 consists of only one single BGA chip. SiS decided to stay with SDRAM memory, which won’t be any real disadvantage for the next few months. Please also read Tom’s evaluation of the KT133A chipset. The benchmarks there show pretty clearly that the higher FSB speed alone provides a performance increase already. Both 100 and 133 MHz processor bus clocks (the latter for the new C-Athlons) are supported by the SiS730, giving you the option to use all available Duron and Athlon CPUs from 500 to 1200 MHz and beyond.

Host Controller

• 1.8 V Core with mixed 3.3 V and 5 V CMOS
• Support of 100 or 133 MHz processor bus clock
• Support of AMD PowerNow!
• Support of Synchronous or Asynchronous Processor Bus/Memory Clock

DRAM Interface

• Up to 3 DIMM Slots (6 Banks)
• Up to 1.5 GB SDRAM
• Up to 133 MHz Memory Clock

AGP Port

• AGP 2.0 Compliant
• AGP 4x
• Fast Writes Support

Features Of The SiS 730S Chipset, Continued

PCI Interface

• Up to 4 32 Bit PCI Masters at 33 MHz

Busmaster IDE Controller

• Two UltraDMA/100 channels

Integrated 2D/3D Graphics Accelerator

• 64 Bit Memory Interface
• Up to 64 MB Shared Memory
• 8K Texture Cache
• Supports all important 3D features including flat and gouroud shading, dithering, bump mapping, perspective correction, Mipmapping with trilinear texture filtering, mip-mapped texture with transparency, blending, wrapping, mirroring and clamping, fogging, alpha blending, spectacular lighting, full scene anti aliasing.
• 128 Bit 2D Engine (up to 1600x1200x24 at 85 Hz)
• Video acceleration features inclucing hardware DVD acceleration
• Optional SiS301 video bridge for TV output

PCI Audio

Wavetable Synthesizer

• Six Channel sound
• DirectSound compliant
• Microsoft WDM Streaming
• Support for external AC97 codec
• SPDIF out

Power Management Controller

• ACPI 1.0 (S1, S3, S4, S5)
• APM 1.2

Other Devices

• DMA and Interrupt Controller
• Keyboard Controller
• Universal Serial Bus (USB) Host Controller (2 Controllers, 6 Ports)

Fast Ethernet

• 32 Bit PCI Master
• 10/100 Mbit

Block Diagram

Block diagrams usually look pretty much the same. It’s merely interesting to see that everything has been integrated into one chip.

Also for Socket 370: SiS630 and SiS635

SiS also offers the 630, 630S and 630E chipset for some months now, which includes the same basic features. The major difference is their support of Pentium III and Celeron processors.

If you want more information on SiS core logic, please take a look at the following page on the SiS website:

Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. – Product, Core Logic

SiS is also working on a DDR chipset for Pentium III and Celeron systems. With a little luck, we might also see an Athlon chipset with DDR support as well.

All-In-One Solution or 3D Platform?

To some extent the SiS chipsets are bohemian products. Being impressively integrated, they are much less expensive to produce than two-chip solutions. Therefore they seem predestinated for low-cost desktop solutions, as they come with all components a business computer might need: Standard 2D/3D graphics functions, a fast IDE interface, sound and even a network controller – everything is included for free. Having all of this on the motherboard clearly helps to economize the costs for the complete machine.

Surprisingly enough SiS decided to include an external AGP port as well. Thanks to that, you may equip a SiS730 motherboard with a fast 3D graphics card, making a gaming machine out of it. I can imagine that many users might be interested in a cheap motherboard with this chipset instead of purchasing a more expensive VIA solution. Right now it is clearly more convenient for gamers to save up to $50 on the motherboard and invest that money into a faster graphics card. The overall performance will usually be better going this way.

When studying the benchmarks please take into account that I used quite a slow processor, a Duron 700 MHz. That’s one of the cheapest models available right now. Nonetheless this CPU is fast enough to produce good frame rates with current 3D games – provided that you are using a good 3D graphics board. Windows applications usually run fast enough anyway, so that software like MS Office can be left out of these considerations.

Don’t forget that these thoughts are based on the matter of fact that the SiS730 is a budget solution. It’s not a chipset for high-end systems.

Stability and Drivers

I remember that a few years ago many people complained about reliability and stability issues of platforms based on VIA, SiS, VLSI, UMC and ALi chipsets. While VLSI has been bought by Philips and UMC does not design chipsets any more, the other three have lately provided reliable and stable products for quite some time now. I remember prototype motherboards running so unstable that you had to spend the whole night to get benchmarks finished. The SiS730 reference board did not cause a single hang up or any other trouble at all, which was a pleasant surprise, considering that it is still a prototype board. I have to complain about SiS’ driver support however. Of course they have their own AGP and video drivers, but I was missing a refined IDE driver, which could have improved hard disk performance.

Does Intel have Reasons to Feel Threatened?

Home users are sometimes not aware of the fact that a large quota of all computer sales is used by businesses. Only one third of all PCs can be found in homes. If it was your job to order several dozen or even hundreds of computers for your company, you would start to do razor sharp price calculations.

So far there weren’t a lot of chances to assemble a low-end Duron computer as cheap as a system based on Intel’s Celeron. The reason is very simple. There wasn’t any inexpensive chipset with integrated graphics available. That situation looks completely different if you want to build up an Intel-based ‘value’-computer. Decision-makers could either pick the Intel 810 or 815 chipset, VIA’s ProSavage PM133 or the ALi Aladdin TNT2. All of them include at least the graphics functions.

If you wanted to build a low-cost computer based on a Duron processor, you lately had the chance to use VIA’s ProSavage KM133, which also comes with integrated graphics. Unfortunately, the ProSavage KM133 has only become available recently, and before buyers usually swapped to an Intel-based solution.

The SiS730 seems to be the perfect low-cost solution. Our tests have been very painless, showing pretty well that the chipset seems to be matured. There are many reasons why I would definitely prefer a Duron system to a Celeron system. The processor has always been able to offer a much better price/performance ratio. The Celeron is limited to 66 MHz (at 800 MHz it’s 100 MHz at last) processor bus clock, while Duron runs at 100 MHz double-pumped. Finally the Duron can be teamed up with PC100 or PC133 SDRAM memory, while Celeron systems usually work with 66 MHz memory. In addition, there is no price difference between 66 MHz and 133 MHz SDRAM memory any more. The issue about memory speed is very important for chipsets with integrated graphics, as the graphics performance depends heavily on the data bandwidth between the graphics core and the main memory, which is in part used as graphics memory.

Test Setup

Benchmarks

Memory Bandwith Benchmark

I used SiSoft Sandra 6.0 to get some performance information about the memory interface. Everybody will agree with me that the newcomer does not seem to be a good performer. Let’s check the real world benchmarks now to see how this affects everyday’s software.

BAPCo SYSmark 2000

In my opinion BAPCo’s SYSmark is still the best benchmarking suite to determine the overall business performance. However, the actual numbers are rather theoretical, as even a 300 MHz machine can provide enough performance for processing documents, spread sheets or similar stuff. The green line is the benchmark result using the integrated graphics engine of the SiS730. The blue one represents the result using a GeForce 2 Pro graphics card. As expected, the advantage of such an expensive graphics card over the integrated engine is not worth mentioning.

BAPCo SYSmark 2000 – Windows 98

As you could see in the chart before, the new SiS730 chipset is not able to beat VIA’s KT133. That also applies to the new KT133A chipset, as it has only be updated to support 133 MHz FSB (Athlon C models). SiS’s 730 chipset already supports this processor bus by default.

The performance delta between the SiS and the VIA chipset is between 3 and 12% in Windows 98, depending on the application. Memory intensive applications like Bryce, Elastic Reality (3D modeling and rendering), Premiere (video editing) or Paradox (database software) do clearly suffer from SiS lower SDRAM bandwidth. However, you won’t be able to get those scores using a Celeron 700 system.

BAPCo SYSmark 2000 – Windows 2000

The situation is quite the same in Windows 2000. Just the Power Point result is considerable higher using a VIA KT133 motherboard. You can also see both chipsets are almost on par in Photoshop 5.5, Corel Draw 9, Premiere 5.1 and Word 2000.

MDK2 Demo

MDK2 is a Direct3D-based action shooter. We used the demo version for benchmarking: As you can see, the integrated graphics engine of the SiS chipset is not exactly a great performer. When using the GeForce 2 graphics card, there is very little difference between SiS730S and VIA’s Apollo KT133.

Mercedes Benz Truck Racing

The truck racing demo offers very good image quality if you turn on all possible 3D features. However, that would have made both the game and the benchmark unplayable on the SiS graphics engine, that’s why I ran those tests with the default settings. Even at 640×480, this game is not fun playing on our benchmark system configuration. 22 frames per second are not enough for game play. After plugging in the GeForce 2 Pro card, you can easily play MBTR at up to 1280×1024 on both the SiS and the VIA system. At 1024×768 and 1280×1024, this game runs even faster on the SiS platform! As soon as you increase the resolution, you can see how the lower memory bandwith of the SiS730 has gradually more impact on the frame rate.

Quake III Arena

Quake III is absolutely unplayable with the SiS graphics engine. Even at 640×480, the system was not even able to score 20 fps. Again, using the fast nVIDIA GeForce 2 Pro board boosts up the frame rates 5-10 times. VIA’s KT133 is about 10% faster than the SiS730.

SPECviewperf 6.1.2

The performance differences between the SiS and the VIA chipset are much bigger using the high-end OpenGL benchmark SPECviewperf. It can also be used as a test for system stability, as it will most likely crash if a system component does not work reliably.

Design Review (DRV-07) runs about 35% faster on the VIA board than on the SiS730 – a clear tribute to the better memory performance of the KT133 chipset. All other applications definitely run faster on the KT133 board as well. If you plan to run such high-end programs, you should spend the higher price for a VIA KT133 chipset motherboard.

Conclusion

Reviewing prototype motherboards has formerly been quite a piece of work. Not this one. No hang ups, no driver issues. Everything was just like with a fully matured product. I guess SiS spend a lot of time optimizing and refining the chipset, as there was seemingly no need to rush it to the market as fast.

The result is just what the business sector needed: A relatively fast, reliable and well-featured chipset. No other manufacturer offers a product with the same feature range as the SiS630 and SiS730 family.

Even though SiS engineers rely on the Windows default IDE drivers, I’m sure that specialized ones can improve the overall performance some more. There might also be some room for optimizing the memory performance as well. If you think about chipset comparisons of the whole last decade, SiS might be in a good situation. This time there is no competiting chipset from Intel to outperform the SiS product.

Finally the low value/budget segment has now two different Athlon/Duron chipsets to pick from, VIA’s ProSavage KM133 and the SiS730. I expect the SiS to be cheaper though better featured. With those two chipsets available, the business computing sector is no longer depending on Intel chipsets or processors. There is even more behind it. The value of a business computer is increased by an AMD Duron processor. You get a faster processor, faster memory and a better featured chipset for the same price – isn’t that a good deal?

The home and performance-desktop sector was the first of three areas to be entered by AMD, now AMD has good chances to enter the value segment. This leaves only one major part still free from AMD processors: Workstations and Server systems. That will change once AMD gets the AMD760-MP chipset ready to go.