Is it odd that my favorite chipsets are non intel?

I've got multiple SiS based chipset motherboars. Currently i have:
PCChips M747 - Slot 1 - SiS 5600
ECS K7S5A - Socket A - SiS 735
ECS P4S5A/DX+ - Socket 478 - SiS 645DX
Gigabyte GA-8SR533 - Socket 478 - SiS 645DX
Fujitsu D1495 - Socket 478 - SiS 645DX
ASUS P4S800 - Socket 478 - SiS 648FX
Gigabyte GA-8S648FX-775 - LGA 775 - SiS 648FX
Gigabyte GA-8S655FX - Socket 478 - SiS 655FX
ASUS P5S800-VM - LGA775 - SiS 661FX
Foxconn WinFast 760GXK8MC - Socket 754 - SiS 760GX

I used to have an MSI 645E Max2 (Fujitsu OEM, basically a retail mobo with a Fujitsu BIOS) was a great board, supported 3.3v cards and was pretty much a good performer

SiS chips for the Athlon/Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and some for the Pentium 4 (like the SiS 645DX and 655FX) were really good and a huge step over previous chipsets imo

the SiS 645 for the P4 gave some serious competition to the Intel 850 and desrtoyed the Intel 845 with it's PC133 controller at the time, the SiS 735 for the Athlon was also a good contender in the Socket A plataform, even outperforming the VIA KT266/266A in multiple benchmarks in some reviews

I wonder how good is my Gigabyte GA-8S655FX i got weeks ago, i haven't benched it yet, only checked to see if it work and acording to many reviews, the SiS 655FX is a dual channel DDR400 chipset for the P4 running at FSB 800, in benches, it was comparable with the Intel 865PE and even the 875P, as well with VIA's counterpart, the VIA PT880

One of my systems has an Asus P5SD2-VM:

It's AFAICT the only consumer motherboard released with the last PC chipset that SiS put out, the 672. (The AMD counterpart 771/772 does not appear to have made it to market.) It's very much low-budget for 2007-2008, and drivers are not available for OSes older than Win2K, but it's very stable (granted it's running only an E2180 at stock, 2GB of 667MHz memory, an HD 4350, and Win7 32-bit) and goes OK. It's nice that the last chipset they put out is very usable, even if it's not especially interesting or high-performance.

My experience with SiS is quite limited. Build a rig around a SiS 5598 at least once and can't say much about it except that it worked (it was build more for testing stuff). Also a s3 rig with SiS chipset and I did have stability problems at the time, but that's probably more to do with me being a n00b back then and not SiS's fault 🤣

A friend of mine had a LAN with several Athlon XP rigs and most of these were Asrock SiS builds and they seemed to just work.

Back in the day SIS very much had a budget chipset reputation. It was definitely low cost, which lead to a lot of the budget manufacturer's using SIS en-mass along in boards with onboard video and audio before onboard video and audio were common in custom machines. A lot of these boards were poor quality but that was the board manufacturer's fault not SIS's. In hindsight the SIS boards from manufacturer's like Asus, Abit, and Gigabyte amount others were actually quite high performers. On the Intel side of the house Intel wanted to force you to adapt new technologies leading them to be less flexible. The whole Universal AGP slot on P4 motherboards being primarily a feature of SIS chipsets is an example of this.

In practice performance on SIS chipsets rivals and sometimes even exceeds its Intel and Via counterparts. Not sure about nVidia nforce Socket A is the one platform I have never used an SIS chipset on. Now time to go to eBay and fix that... 🤣

Back in college, I used the famous ECS K7S5A + Athlon XP 1600+ (O/C to 2100+) combo. Never had any real problems with it. I also had a SIS 745 Athlon XP chipset. No significant issues whatsoever. Never did use SiS + Intel though.

That said, I just bought a P4S533 (with universal AGP). Kind of bummed out that the P4-3.06 HT doesn't work with it.

I've had multiple mothearboards with SiS chipsets over the years, no complaints whatsoever.

Most recently, my DOS rig has been running a PCCHIPS M598LMR motherboard which has the SiS 530 chipset, and a K6-2 CXT running stock 550mhz. Despite being a low budget motherboard (it was pretty much commonplace in Brazil, utilized in upgrade packs for people with 486/Pentiums) and having a pretty bad rep, it's been pretty stable; the only onboard feature I'm using is the graphics adapter, which is supposed to be an integrated version of the SiS 6326 AGP card. Its 2D performance tops all the other contenders such as the S3 Trio 64 and the Tseng, so I don't intend on replacing it with an offboard card. Except if I happen to stumble upon a Voodoo 2 or 3, but those are quite rare and thus expensive to buy in Brazil.

My first slot-1 PC was a PcChips 741LMR with the SiS xcel2000 chipset. IIRC it was sluggish with PC66 RAM but the thing seemed to fly once I got my hands on a PC100 256MB DIMM and threw it in.

I actually really liked the SiS integrated graphics and the look of games in software rendering. To this day I still don't know why.

Stability/performance wise... wouldn't avoid it, wouldn't seek it out either or pay even medium sums of money they wound up on a lot of budget boards that were usually paired with budget PSUs and factor in ~20 years of age...

It's a very ineresting thread. Being a Vogons member for some time now I know that SIS chipsets are the way to go if you want to build a decent 486 retro rig. And Opti are said to be the worst of all (here I read that actually VIA chipsets should be considered the worst of all). But I guess no one has ever done any attempt to make a comprehensive chipsets comparison. There is one I found here on Vogons, but it only compares SIS to UMC.

A comprehensive comparison based on facts would be a cool thing to do. It's too bad I was always partial to SIS and have no other chipsets to compare 😀

Elbereth wrote:

My first slot-1 PC was a PcChips 741LMR with the SiS xcel2000 chipset. ...

Actually the SiS 620 chipset. PC Chips relabeled a lot of chipsets used on their motherboards during the 1990s, for whatever reason, and "Xcel2000" is one of the names they used (others include TXPro, VXPro, GFXcel, etc, not all of which were used on SiS chipsets).

SW-SSG wrote:

Elbereth wrote:

My first slot-1 PC was a PcChips 741LMR with the SiS xcel2000 chipset. ...

Actually the SiS 620 chipset. PC Chips relabeled a lot of chipsets used on their motherboards during the 1990s, for whatever reason, and "Xcel2000" is one of the names they used (others include TXPro, VXPro, GFXcel, etc, not all of which were used on SiS chipsets).

Yeah, these names could be also ALi, VIA chipsets or even the Utron UT801x, i have a PCChips M747 which has the BX Pro label, but is actually a SiS 5600 chipset

There a full list on this site: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/chipset-aliase … -vx-pro-and-co/

I got another SiS based motherboard, an ASUS A7S333 which is based on the SiS 745, i heard it competed against the VIA KT333 and is probably the last SiS Socket A chipset to support AGP 2x, i'd like to find more SiS based boards for the Athlon, like SiS 746 (which probably only made it's way on ECS motherboards) and the SiS 748 (KT600/880 and nForce 2 competitor)

Carlos S. M. wrote:

... SiS 746 ...

See: ASRock K7S8X and K7S8X R3.0.

There is a (leaked?) schematic here that suggests the K7S8X drives the CPU VRM using +12v, but I don't know if this is true. The board certainly doesn't have a ATX12V connector...

I had a decent time with 741GX and 761GX around 2004-2005 on inexpensive ECS boards (good stability and performance)

SIS 530, well I still have a couple of PC Chips 598LRMs, and it's my least favorite board, apart from the fake cache chips the boards always gave me a headache with unexpectedly low performance and instability, comparing it to another cheap all integrated via mvp4 Compaq (Mitac) board just confirmed it, not that I think the chipset is all to blame, is probably more PC Chips and their implementation

I think other than that I haven't used many SIS boards, I think I was somewhat interested in the 748 and 661FX at some point

SiS was cutting edge with their "Rabbit" 386 chipset, the 411 EISA chipset, and the 471(VL) and 496(PCI) 486 chipsets. Although I have not used it, their original Pentium chipset was also said to be quite competitive with Intel's offerings (1993/4). They were unable to compete with the Triton chipsets however, and pinned some of their future on the Cyrix 6x86 taking off. The 5571 was the premier chipset for the 6x86 at the time of release, as it supported features specific to that CPU. That was probably the last time the SiS chipset was relevant.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

I got another SiS based motherboard, an ASUS A7S333 which is based on the SiS 745, i heard it competed against the VIA KT333 and is probably the last SiS Socket A chipset to support AGP 2x, i'd like to find more SiS based boards for the Athlon, like SiS 746 (which probably only made it's way on ECS motherboards) and the SiS 748 (KT600/880 and nForce 2 competitor)

I had a SiS748 board bought as new and my final socketA mobo back then with barton 2500+@3200+ CPU and AGP 8X R9700. It was more reliable and even faster than nf2 ultra400 epox board. Faster IDE controller and even memory controller was on par with dual-channel nforce, of course after some tweaking. Not to mention, that the board was dirt cheap opposed to VIA or nforce. Only missing thing was it's unability to change vcore (but I didn't need to change it, my CPU was stable at that overclock on default voltage). Shame on motherboard manufacturers, that there were such few models available - only ECS/PCChips, Asrock or Gigabyte motherboards were available in our country.

I used to have a Socket 478 motherboard with an SIS chipset, which had a Prescott Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0E installed. I used to run it 24/7 as a server, running Windows Server 2003.

I don't recall now what board or chipset it was, only that one day it decided to go "pop" and took 1 of my hard drives out with it. Though this was a pretty terrible build from day 1 really, I did it all on the cheap and the consequences were alarming - I moved the mouse 1 day to turn on the screen, after playing "Flatout Ultimate Carnage" on it some hours earlier and the PSU & UPS exploded! This was about a year before the motherboard died.

I pretty much always associated SIS with cheap & budget builds and generally avoided it along with VIA etc.

I replaced the failed motherboard with a board containing an Intel 865G chipset and that PC is still working great, though not used much anymore.

Sorry for the necropost
I have 2 mb with different Sis chipset for p4:
ECS P4S5A rev 1.2a: http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Prod … nuID=24&LanID=0
with SiS 645 and SiS 961, it supports support for both sdr and ddr (333) processors with fsb 400
Medion MS-6719 Ver1: with Sis 651 and Sis 962, integrated vga, 2 ddr slot, matx format, it's the oem version o MSI MS-6533EG-LM probably.

Is Sis 651 better than 645? Probably the 651 is better since it supports 533mhz bus speed, but being an oem mb it won't be easy to update the bios and so on.

Which one would you keep?

I've been googling for hours trying to unveil the mystery behind why I can't get any DDR to run CR1/1T on either of my motherboards with SiS chipsets. One's a SYNTAX S651M w/ SiS651(obviously). And the other's an ASUS P4S800-MX w/ SiS661FX. Both have the option to set the command rate in the BIOS. But neither will even POST with it set to 1T(just yields a big long screeching PC speaker telling me I'm stupid). It HAS to be set to auto or 2T(or no POST, let alone boot). Which so far as I can tell are the same thing...Auto = 2T = Auto...NOT 1T. Not that there's any real way to tell...since there's hardly any software that can even tell me what the timings are. Half of which are wrong about those according to the BIOS. And none of them have a clue what the command rate is. I'm guessing that auto and 2T are the same based on memory bandwidth and latency tests that don't change with either one selected. And this is all frustrating beyond words let me tell ya. I've never in all my years had to deal with this kind of thing. It has nothing to do with the RAM itself, or any of the other timings, either. I've tried with many different sticks, ranging from 256MB to 1GB and DDR266 to DDR400(and everything in between). And with the speed set @ every possible notch from 100MHz to 250MHz, and timings as loose or as tight as possible, in the BIOS. But there's literally NOTHING I can do to make CR1/1T happen. It's torture that they'd include that setting in the BIOS...when it's completely non-functional. PURE torture. On top of the fact that it's totally ridiculous that it doesn't work...AT ALL!!! Why? Just why? Like I said, I've never seen anything like it before. Never even heard of anything like it in fact. Well...until today when I heard a guy saying he was having the same problem with a VIA chipset. But that's sort of besides the point. Sort of...but not really? Maybe? I don't even know anymore...

So...is this actually a thing? Are there really crappy NB chipsets that can't even run any DDR w/ CR1/1T? If so...why? And why do they all seem to have a setting for it in the BIOS anyway? What kind of absolute madness is this???? Please tell me I've got it all wrong. Please don't tell me about OEM motherboards with no available memory settings that ALWAYS run CR2/2T. I know all about that jazz. This is different. These are "enthusiast"(term used as loosely as possible) motherboards with command rate settings in the BIOS.

Side note: I really like these SiS chipsets other than that. Don't have a single solitary complaint otherwise. Solid, stable, reliable, dependable, do just as advertised and then some. Except run DDR w/ CR1/1T. 😢

Tetrium wrote:

My experience with SiS is quite limited. Build a rig around a SiS 5598 at least once and can't say much about it except that it worked (it was build more for testing stuff).

My NLX system also has a SiS 5598 chipset (Asus SP98N motherboard), including the integrated video option, and although the board itself is generally stable the integrated video is anything but. It uses an early shared video memory implementation that is ...wonky..., to say the least. After changing the video memory size in the BIOS (it can be set from 1 Mb to 4 Mb) it takes several reboots before the memory change registers properly and the OS doesn't try to write data to that memory area. DirectX 5 is installed in Windows 98, but I daren't use it, because just redrawing the whole screen once when loading/exiting programs already shows massive slowdowns (you can see it redraw the screen 😵 ).

Good thing there are PCI slots. 😀