Introduction

AMD-760 DDR killer?

While VIA has become a popular name in the chipset market over the past year, Silicon Integrated Systems Corporation (SiS) has remained a relatively small player in the sector. However, back in the glory days of the Socket 7 platform, VIA, ALi, and SiS competed very heavily for the second place spot behind Intel's TX chipset. When Intel transitioned to the Slot 1 interface utilized by the Pentium II processor, the three Taiwanese companies were left to battle it out for the premier Socket 7 spot. In the end, ALi's Aladdin V chipset ruled the performance space, with VIA's MVP3 and the SiS 5-series of chipsets competing heavily in the value segment.

DDR!	The top end of the motherboard

Hanging by a moment

This is pretty much where SiS has remained for the past few years, which is why you've seen so little coverage of their products here on this site. During Comdex 2000 in Las Vegas last November, AMD demonstrated a few Duron systems based on SiS's 730 chipset (which includes integrated graphics), but motherboards based on SiS 730 haven't been available until just recently.

With such a rich history in the value segment, the majority of the online community overlooked SiS's DDR chipset announcements in December of last year. Like VIA, SiS focused their initial efforts on their Pentium III DDR chipset, SiS 635. At that time, the company had received the majority of its revenues from chipsets that supported Intel processors; SiS 730 was still in development. Therefore, it made sense to focus on the Intel platform, with their AMD DDR chipset, SiS 735, following by a few months.

With ALi MAGiK 1 offering disappointing performance to date, and KT266 motherboards receiving those final coats of polish before public release, SiS 735 enters the performance segment of the market just in time to make an impact.

SiS 735

From a features standpoint, SiS 735 shares many of the same traits as ALi MAGiK1 and VIA KT266, all three support both conventional SDRAM and DDR SDRAM. In contrast, AMD's 760 chipset only supports DDR SDRAM, and AMD's specification for AMD-760 only allows two DIMM sockets.

But the SiS 735 has one trait that stands out from the rest of the DDR crowd...

System off

System on!