SiS 746FX Reference Board Review (8)
Overclocker 8 Jan 2002

In our tests, the SiS746FX is a serious contender. From most of the tests, we can see that it has overtaken VIA KT400 as the direct competitor to the nVIDIA nForce2. Although it couldn't take over as the fastest chipset available for the AMD platform, it is definitely a very formidable competitor in the non-3D arena. In the 3D tests, we see a consistent 3% difference between the two chipsets. In fact, SiS 746FX has done a major break through with the Async Memory settings which brings performance level up, not down.

In the SiSoft tests, the memory benchmarks could catch up with Dual Channel nForce2 boards but still lacks that little bit. In fact, we are very satisfied with its arithmetic performance which is shown on the benchmarks. The Multimedia and data crunching is also outstanding too considering that the same CPU is used for all tests. When we run SuperPI at Async DDR400, it manages a score of 55s, that is very good. In fact, the most astonishing results were from the Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002 results. They're exceptionally high and it seems that the high performance IDE performance which resulted in the high results.

As this is a reference board, we won't see any overclocking features on board. According to SiS, the manufacturers of the boards will implement other features of the chipset. On the 963L, 1394 is removed but HomePNA is in.

We find that the SiS 746FX is indeed what most of the SiS 735 users have been waiting for. It is now the manufacturers on whether they will release boards based on this new chipset. According to what I know, ECS would have the L7S7A but I am not sure if it uses SiS 746 or 746FX. The rest of the manufactures that will probably release SiS746FX boards are MSI, DFI and Iwill. 

* we will be updating this review with a 333mhz cpu later.

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Highly Recommended

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