Testing impressions

Since we’re dealing with a reference board here, we won’t discuss traits like the board’s layout and BIOS implementation. Motherboard manufacturers rather than SiS will decide both of these aspects. We have however provided a few pictures, as we know you enjoy looking at them.

The SiS748 reference board

It's actually a very big board

Stability

To test stability, we decided to push the specs of the hardware as much as we could. That means in DDR400 mode we conducted our testing with both memory sockets populated with 2-2-2 timings. Unfortunately we don’t have 1GB DIMMs available so we were unable to hit the max memory ceiling of the SiS 748 chipset.

In any case, stability of the reference SiS 748 platform was good but not perfect. The system locked up on three occasions over the course of our use with it. We have a suspicion that the temperature of the North Bridge compromised system stability. On one of those three instances textures on the screen were corrupted just before we lost the system, a characteristic you normally see during overclocking or when your system is overheating. Remember as we mentioned earlier in this article, the 748 North Bridge would get hot during extended testing. We didn’t encounter any application crashes or Windows blue screens, which is definitely a good sign.

Compatibility

If you recall our RADEON 9700 PRO reviews from last year, we were never truly able to give a thumbs-up to the SiS 648/RADEON 9700 combination. System stability just wasn’t where we thought it needed to be.

Therefore, one of the first cards we tested the SiS 748 reference boards with was the ATI RADEON 9700 PRO. We threw everything we could at it and didn’t encounter any problems. In fact, the entire RADEON 9x00 family of graphics cards worked perfectly, other than the aforementioned lockups.

Next, we tried GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. Once again we didn’t encounter anything nearly reminiscent of the SiS 648/RADEON 9700 problems we've encountered in the past. It looks like SiS has got their game together on the video front for SiS 748.

Likewise memory compatibility was flawless, although we do have to admit that we only have memory modules from Corsair, Mushkin, and OCZ to test with. We tested with their DDR333 and up DIMMs, so we’re talking high quality memory here.

Overall we were quite pleased to see the components we tested with work so flawlessly with SiS 748. We were definitely concerned about GeForce FX 5900 compatibility in particular since it is the newest card we have available.