The SIS 755 - The Other Athlon 64 Chipset!

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VIA & Nvidia are the two major providers of chipsets for AMD processors. Less well known is SIS, creator of the SIS 735/745/746 series of chipsets for Socket A Athlons. Now Techreport compares the SIS 755 Athlon 64 chipset to the major players.

NVIDIA AND VIA HAVE dominated the enthusiast market for Athlon 64 chipsets, but they're not the only ones with core logic for AMD's latest processors. SiS has quietly been churning out the SiS755 chipset, which is seeing a lot of action in Socket 754 boards from ECS, ASRock, and Foxconn.

The SiS755 chipset is made up of SiS755 north bridge and SiS964 south bridge chips, which come with all the usual integrated features. On the north bridge, the SiS755 houses an AGP 8X interface and 16-bit, 800MHz bi-directional HyperTransport link, but that's about it. North bridge chips for AMD64 processors haven't been all that interesting since AMD took the memory controller, which is traditionally a north bridge component, and moved it onto the processor.

The SiS964 south bridge integrates a six-channel AC'97 audio controller, eight USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 Fast Ethernet, two ATA/133 IDE channels, and a couple of Serial ATA ports. The SiS964 also supports two-drive Serial ATA RAID 0, 1, and JBOD arrays.

Other than Quake3 based games and USB throughput tests the SIS755 performed quite well. It was usually within a percentage point or two of the test leader and acutally won a few benchmarks.

Source: Techreport