The reference board

First thoughts

SiS provided their SiS 735 reference board for our tests. Based off the microATX form factor, the reference board provides one AGP slot, three PCI slots, and one ACR slot. While dipswitches are provided for adjusting CPU parameters, we used the BIOS to adjust settings. To accomplish this, a small selection of bus speeds and clock multipliers were available for adjustment.

The stability of our SiS 735 board was pretty good for a reference board; we've seen retail products with less stability than this board! We encountered a handful of slow boot up times thanks to delays during POST, but unlike the KT133 reference board we tested a year ago, we didn't have to use the reset button to get a video signal. In fact, this is the most polished prerelease reference board we've seen yet, including Intel's 815 chipset.

The lower half of the motherboard

As you can see in the pictures provided throughout this article, our reference board shipped sans heatsink. During tests we would check the chipset's temperature from time to time with the good old finger check, and fortunately the chipset was barely warm to the touch. We have a strong suspicion this is largely due to the 0.18-micron manufacturing process the chipset is based on. SiS also has extensive experience designing efficient single-chip solutions. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised if a handful of motherboard manufacturers chose not to implement heatsinks on the SiS 735 products to keep costs down.

Memory compatibility

We threw every DDR module we had in the office at the SiS 735, and it ran with every one of them flawlessly. In particular, DDR modules from Crucial, Corsair, Mushkin, Smart Modular, and even the Nanya modules bundled with DDR chipsets from VIA were tested with our reference board and they all worked flawlessly. Even when modules were mixed and matched we didn't run into any problems. Like we said earlier, this is definitely the most solid prerelease board we've tested in recent memory. Other than the slow boot ups we encountered a few times and the occasional crash, our system was built for testing. SiS even provides power and reset buttons on the board itself, just like the ABIT TH7-RAID!

Ultra mode for max performance

Adjusting bus speeds