SiS 648 Motherboard Comparisons & Info

[fxer]

I have been in the market for a 648 motherboard for about a month and have tried to distill some of the information i have gathered about these board and put it here, first a few remarks:

1) Integrated LAN - Basically it should not be a deciding factor? It is a nice feature, but NIC cards cost under $10 and all these boards have 5, and most 6 PCI slots, so a NIC will not be taking up precious realty. Integrated LAN is just a bonus.

2) RAID (Serial ATA or regular IDE) - Some people don't need RAID, but just remember without raid you can only have 4 IDE drives in your computer (floppy's are not IDE). Most people have 1 HD, 1 CD-RW, 1 DVD player, so you can have 1 more peripheral, another HD is an obvious choice, but then you are out of space. If you have a full tower case, you probably need IDE RAID / Serial ATA as well. Also, RAID is only for hardrives, and you need HD's in pairs of 2 to work it

3) Overclocking - Well, i hate to say it but the SiS648 is not just an overclockable chipset. People keep waiting for the next board to come out that can push the FSB and memory timings up to the level of the intel 845G but it won't happen. It's the chipset, not the motherboards.

4) Memory - As far as memory is concerned, SiS648 mobos don't need anything more OR less than PC2700 (DDR333) RAM. You don't want slower ram than that, it's just silly And as for PC3200 RAM, well as i said the 648 doesn't overclock well so you will never get the extra performance you paid for out of that Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 RAM, so get Corsair XMS2700 Cas2 ram

5) Serial ATA - This is the wave of the future, so get a couple connectors on your motherboard now. Just like when USB started creeping into motherboards, Serial ATA is doing it now. Getting SATA now will save you the trouble of buying an addon card or IDE to SATA converters later on.

Alright enough of that ranting, here is some of that comparison stuff i promised in the header, there are 6 boards out there that I have found, at google just type in the motherboard model and "review" after it and you will get a lot of EXCELLENT in depth reviews for all of them, that's where I got all this information from anyways

Number of supported Drives:

Asus P4S8X (6) 4 ATA133, and 2 RAID ATA133 or Serial ATA RAID, can't use both RAIDs!!!
Abit SR7-8X (4) 4 ATA133, no RAID or Serial ATA connectors
Shuttle AS45GTR (10) 4 ATA133, 4 RAID ATA133, 2 Serial ATA RAID
EPoX 4SDA5+ (8) 4 ATA133, 4 RAID ATA133
MSI 648 Max-F (4) 4 ATA133
Gigabyte 8SG667 (4) 4 ATA133

Well, the Shuttle is the obvious choice here for filling up your full tower case, and it has Serial ATA, quite nice.

Number of DDR333/PC2700 Sticks supported:

Asus P4S8X (3)
Abit SR7-8X (3)
Shuttle AS45GTR (2)
EPoX 4SDA5+ (2)
MSI 648 Max-F (3)
Gigabyte 8SG667 (2)

All these boards have 3 DIMM slots but half the boards can only use 2 of them with DDR333, which as i said earlier is probably the best choice for these boards. If you use PC2100 (don't!!) you can fill up all 3 slots (again, don't! I thought about this only being able to use 2 DIMM slot business and decided that it is more than enough! You put in one 512mb dimm now, and if you ever need to again in the life of this motherboard, drop in about 512mb stick. I don't see the need for more than 1GB of system memory, when that is not enough (god help us) we will be several generations of motherboards beyond anything today.

and finally just a little bit of gravy:

Asus P4S8X - Onboard LAN, Onboard FireWire
Abit SR7-8X - Onboard LAN
Shuttle AS45GTR - Onboard FireWire
EPoX 4SDA5+ - Onboard LAN, Onboard FireWire
MSI 648 Max-F - Onboard Gigabit LAN (futureproof
Gigabyte 8SG667 - Wow, really bare bones

Also all drives have 6 USB 2.0 ports. They have a minimum of 2 built in, some have 4 built in. In either case, the motherboard has headers for either 2 or 4 more ports (always 6 ports per board, do the math! This mean you can connect the extra USB ports with a backplate (you know, those things that take up a PCI slot, most of these boards come with 1 of these in the box) or to your nice Lian-LI or Antec case that has front mounted usb ports.

Also all boards have built in sound, which is great, because it does the job until you decide on a SoundBlaster Audigy or Live! or something similar when you save up more cash

Oh well, i hope this information is useful and accurate, i bet i have a couple errors in there but that's what these forums are for, it's like hundreds of editors. Thanks to all the hardware reviewers out there because without their work we would all still be in the dark, enjoy!

-justin m

 

[First]

fxer, nice compilation of SiS 648 data, I'd just like to add a couple of things.

First, my stress tests with SiS 648 motherboards like the Shuttle AK45GTR, ABIT SR7-8X, MSI 648 Max-F, and Gigabyte 8SG667 all show that filling up all 3 memory banks with DDR333 doesn't negatively affect stability and/or performance compared to a single DIMM of DDR333. All 4 retail SiS 648 boards I've tested are reliable and exceptional DDR333 performers, all banks filled or not.

DDR400 operation is a different story. With the latest BIOS and drivers, the Shuttle AK45GTR was simply unable to operate at DDR400 speeds.

With the latest BIOS and drivers, the ABIT SR7-8X was able to work very well with one DIMM of DDR400 memory (I used Twinmos and Mushkin CL2.5 DDR400). However, the SR7-8X simply wouldn't work stabily with 2 or more sticks of the two types of DDR400 I tested.

With the latest BIOS and drivers, the MSI 648 Max-F was able to work fairly well with one DIMM of DDR400 memory (I used Twinmos and Mushkin CL2.5 DDR400). However, I did encounter a few freezes/crashes. I must mention that MSI didn't engineer the 648 Max-F for DDR400 operation, so it's not all that surprising the 648 Max-F works only decently with DDR400. Of course, 2 or more sticks of DDR400 was simply impossible.

The Gigabyte 8SG667 is the brightest spot of them all as far as DDR400 operation is concerned. With the latest BIOS and drivers, the 8SG667 was able to work flawlessly with 1, 2 and even 3 sticks of DDR400 memory from Mushkin. Gigabyte only certifies that the 8SG667 will work with two sticks of DDR400, so don't be surprised if you buy an 8SG667 and find that DDR400 operation with 3 sticks is poor.

I can't speak for ASUS's or Epox's SiS 648 boards, but we'll have a review of them soon enough, so don't worry too much.

 

[fxer]

Wow, I didn't think the motherboard editor would take notice, let alone respond to my post Thanks alot for your comments about the memory, in most reviews the testbed system only has 1 stick of memory in it, so there is very very little about how many sticks you can actually have in the machine, so I was just going by manufacturer specifications which often undersell/oversell their product.

One area of my original post i couldn't really comment on was if the 648 chipset was really the best thing to buy now. It seems that intel is leaving RDRAM behind so the i850 is not a good option, especially with DDR only marginaly slower and exponentially cheaper. It seems the only other viable option right now is the 845G for intel processors. I was hoping you had better sight of what is on the horizon than i do for potential buyers.

Thanks again for your reply, the more information we can pack about the SiS648 into one thread the better

 

[First]

fxer, no problem, I usually never pass up the chance to respond to my readers.

As far as choosing the best platform for the Pentium 4 today...it all depends. If cost isn't an issue, you obviously want to go the RDRAM route. Intel 850E motherboards are your only choice at this point (although SiS should have their RDRAM-based R658 out relatively soon). Picking a particular motherboard based on the 850E chipset all depends on your needs (do you want overclocking, lots of features, performance, etc.?).

If cost is an issue, you'll go the DDR route. Since DDR400 performance gains are minor right now (and you pay the price too btw), you want to get a well-performing DDR333 motherboard. You could go with an 845G motherboard, which unofficially supports DDR333 memory through the correct PCI dividers. Or you could go the SiS 645DX/648 route; both chipsets officially support DDR333 memory, with the SiS 648 unofficially supporting DDR400.

When it comes down to an actual motherboard, you'll have to know exactly what you want. Do you care about overclocking? Features? Performance? It all depends.

Anyway, glad I could help.