Wow, this thread stirs up memories, some of them not so pleasant. 🤣
- I used to have an ASUS CUSI-FX along with a Celeron 900 back in late 2001. This was based on the SiS 630E chipset with an integrated VGA, which I absolutely hated. My brother picked up a cheap GeForce 2 MX400 around that time and wanted to pass his TNT2 M64 to me, which would have been a nice upgrade compared to the integrated card. Alas, the motherboard had no AGP port and that was the day I learned the difference between motherboard slots...
The performance and driver support of that SiS300 GPU was really bad. I remember attempting to play a really cool Playmobil game, it was called Hype : The Time Quest (hey I was ~9 years old 🤣 ), and it wouldn't render properly! A few driver updates later, I finally managed to play and enjoy that game.
I can't really comment on the performance of the chipset itself, but it probably was on the lower end of the spectrum. Funny trivia, the driver control panel (located at Properties/Advanced/SiS 300 tab) used to have a D3D rollercoaster animation and a slider to select between Quality - Balance - Performance, not unlike nVidia with their spinning logo. For some reason, that amused me very much.
- Later on, around early 2004, I got one of my most dreaded CPU + GPU combinations, which you will have undoubtedly at some point seen me ramble on this forum. I got a QDI Superb 4FX socket 478 motherboard, which was based on the SiS 648FX chipset. Thankfully, this board had AGP and it actually supported HyperThreading and 800MHz FSB CPUs. Granted, it offered pretty much no support for any sort of overclocking, let alone voltage adjustments, but that is to be expected.
However, the system builder (the one who held all the cards/money a.k.a. my dad 🤣 ) fell for the seller's bullshit and paired it with a Celeron 2.4 (Northwood core, not Celeron D/Prescott core) and, get this, a GeForce FX 5600 XT...
The Celeron was a Titanic (TM) piece of shit, NetBurst based of course, with performance tanking so massively no matter the clockspeed. The reason for this was the L2 Cache, which was a measly 128KBs, an absolutely meager amount for NetBurst, an architecture already hampered enough with the measly 8KB of L1 cache 😵 . Bottom line? I would have probably been better off with a Pentium 4 1.5, it was really THAT bad. Or better yet, one of the late Duron CPUs like the Duron 1.6GHz.
And then there was the turd that was the FX 5600 XT. What a killer combo I had there. Unlike ATi, XT meant low end, think of it like the SE branding on ATi products of the time. All of this translated to a very simple fact, the FX 5600 XT was a gimped FX 5600, an already utterly underwhelming product.
The FX 5600 vanilla was clocked at 325MHz and 550MHz for Core and Memory clock respectively, while the XT was clocked at 235MHz and 400MHz respectively. What a load of shit, even when I finally found out how to overclock, I could never get either clocks quite as high as the Vanilla, let alone Ultra variant. At these speeds, I'd wager that even an FX 5200 Ultra was faster.
After getting that PC, I visited a friend who had a Pentium 4 2.0A and a Ti4200 64MB and he had built that in 2002. What a night and day difference, everything he played was so much smoother. I could totally tell, I remember seeing him play Evil Genius, a very Bullfrog-esque, Dungeon Keeper style Strategy game and man it was a lot faster on his PC. So, even a slow, management strategy game showed the difference/disparity between the two builds.
I have never owned something this underwhelming since then. I just learned the hard way that you're supposed to make your own market research, read reviews and get as many opinions as possible. Not a bad lesson to be honest.
A couple of years later, late 2006 or so, I grabbed a P4 HT Northwood 2.8GHz and a Gainward 7600GS Golden Sample (on of the great 7600GS cards with GDDR3, I was matching 7600GT clocks with it 😁) and finally had a respectable system running games I wanted smoothly enough. The SIS 648FX was actually not holding the system back it seemed. At this point I had become tech-savvy enough to check 3DMark scores and benchmarks with other systems online and I was pretty close to other people. Looking back at it, it's pretty cool that SiS' chipset, a quite low end offering, supported the latest socket 478 CPUs (even Prescotts AFAIR), so there's that. I'd like to know how much slower than an 865 it is though, will have to wait on Phil's benches I guess 🤣 .
I honestly never touched anything other than Intel or AMD from that point on, I built a new system around early 2008 with Intel's P35 and never looked back. Nvidia sort of gave up a while later, SiS wasn't around anymore and I think Via stopped prior to Nvidia as well?
Sorry for the huge rant, but this thread really made some memories come back and I had to get these off my chest. I hope it was an interesting read at least 🤣 .
