Please help me find a MOBO (new SiS chipset?)

Here's what I NEED:

True ATA133 and SATA support (not controlled through a PCI bus)
533mhz FSB capability


Things that would also be nice:

6-channel sound
Firewire
LAN
AGP 8x
RAID
Legacy-free
Good OC adjustability (lots of settings) with PCI/AGP lock
Good hardware monitoring capabilities

I originally looked to the SiS 648 chipset, but none of the MOBO's are behaving up to par with their listed specs (I may still look into the Shuttle AS45GTR)
I also heard there is a SiS 655 which I was unable to find on their site, but I did see a SiS R658 which looked promising.

SiS R658 North Bridge
Host Interface Controller
- Support Intel Pentium® 4 CPU
- Support 400/533MHz System Bus

Integrated High Performance RDRAM Controller
- Dual channels RDRAM up to 4 RDIMMs of PC1066/PC800 RDRAM
- Maximum 4GB System Memory
--Support 128M/256M/512M/1G/2G RDRAM Densities
--Support 2x16d and 4i, ECC
-Support up to 64 Direst RDRAM devices
-Suspend-to-RAM(STR)

Support AGP 8X Interface
- Support AGP 8X/4X Interface
- AGP V3.0/AGP V2.0 Compliant
- Support Fast Write Transaction

MuTIOL® Delivering 1GB/s Bandwidth
- Proprietary Interconnect between SiS R658 and SiS963
- Bi-Directional 16-bit Data Bus at 533MHz Operating Frequency


It looks like they just added RDRAM compadability, which is fine with me, but I havn't seen any boards using this yet.

If anyone can find the right board for me it would be greatly appreciated, or if you can just find some using a new SiS chipset.

Kerry

let reality into the equation

KerryrreK said:

Here's what I NEED:

True ATA133 and SATA support (not controlled through a PCI bus)
533mhz FSB capability


Things that would also be nice:

6-channel sound
Firewire
LAN
AGP 8x
RAID
Legacy-free
Good OC adjustability (lots of settings) with PCI/AGP lock
Good hardware monitoring capabilities

Click to expand...

Where to start... OK, lets start here. NO motherboard has everything. Most of the above concerns are trivial compared to the basic cost, performance, stability, and overclockability of a particular board. And there is no SiS board that meets all of the above criteria. So lets focus on ones that makes good computers instead

The best SiS chipset is the 645DX. As you have mentioned, the 648, while appearing superior on paper and satisfying more of your wish list, does not overclock worth beans. 645DX is sure fire at 150fsb (with ram at 187.5 or 225 as quality allows), but the 648 struggles to run much more than 133fsb. Dissapointing at the least, as the board appears improved in some useful ways over 645DX.

Lets go through the list:

ATA133-although useless, 645DX supports it.

SATA-not supported by any current chipset, will only be achieved if an SATA contoller is integrated, and it will be a PCI device. This is not very important, as SATA drives are not to be shipped for some time and show no performance advantage over normal ATA100 units.

533fsb-important, and no problem with 645DX. Unfortunatley that's about all you get with 648. 645 boards typically run mid 150's.

6 channel sound-my Asus P4S533 has the hardware C-media 6 channel sound, but it gets willy at 150fsb. Toss in a SBLive/Audigy and be done with it.

Firewire-would be nice if they integrated it, but o well. You get 6 PCI slots on a P4S533, stick a 25 dollar firewire card in one or get the Audigy OEM with the 1394 port on it.

LAN-Like a good many mb's these days, my P4S533 has the Realtek 8100B integrated lan. Mine gets willy at 150fsb, time for the trusty netgear card.

AGP 8X-It just doesn't matter. AGP 4X is plenty of bus speed. If/when they work out the bugs of the 8X stuff you will be able to switch them to 4X mode and notice no significant performance loss. It's just marketing hype. 648 of couse has 8X AGP, but doesn't overclock worth beans...

RAID-well, it's nice if you need it, but is not integrated on most SiS boards. There are these trusty PCI slots though...

Legacy Free-Exactly what does it matter if you have a parallel port and don't use it? It's a lot better than needing one and not having it. The Abit Max series boards are the only ones out that are legacy free, and one of the improvements to the Max2 series is the addition of some of the legacy ports... There is no SiS based Max series member.

Good OC adjustments-very important, the Asus and Abit boards always satisfy here.

PCI/AGP lock-The 648 has it, but doesn't overclock well at all. The 645DX doesn't but overclocks much better. I think the PCI lock is supposed to help overclocking... While a nice idea you have to go 648 to get it and 648 just isn't that great.

Good Hardware monitoring-always nice, all modern boards have it.

As long as your chip's multiplier is such that 150fsb will satisfy your clock needs, the P4S533 is great. The only thing that actually amounts to a hill of beans that it lacks is USB2.0. 4 USB1.1 ports will have to do, and of couse you can get a 5 port USB2.0 PCI card for about 25 bucks if need be.

648 appears on paper to be the in-every-way improved successor to 648. Unfortunately all the tested examples I have seen struggle to break 133fsb by any reasonable amount.

The new 658 chipset is has not added compatibility for RDRAM, but is a ground up RDRAM chipset. Now that Intel has announced they will develop no more RDRAM chipsets for the desktop one really has to wonder if SiS will bother with 658. It is no faster than 645DX in practice, but at least it cost more...

If you require extreme fsb, none of the SiS chipsets is worth a crap. A quality 845e board like the P4B533 or Abit BD7-II or IT7 provides 175MHz fsb with ease. Don't count on more than 155MHz from 645 boards, and 133 from 648. While the SiS's are a tiny bit quicker per clock cycle for graphical tasks, most chips achieve higher clock rates on 845e/g's.

This is my first system to ever build, and in fact the first PC I’ve ever owned (I grew up on a Mac and my mom’s Dell laptops, one of which I’m on now) I understand that no board has everything really, and the ones that do (Asus P4S8X) cant support it. Have you read any reviews of the new Giga-byte SiS 648 board?

Gigabyte Review 8SG667

A 8SG667 owner talks about it's stability here

It definitely shows what the chipset can do as far as overclocking and memory stability at high speeds (unfortunately though it has no features whatsoever, but with the PCI slots as you said, I should be able to get all the features I want fairly cheaply and get better quality than on-board)

I'm curious as to why ATA133 is "useless". It should be faster than ATA100, and if I plan on doing extensive video editing (large file transfers), it would help, right? I also know that the current line of Intel chipsets only supports ATA100, even though some boards boast ATA133 through RAID controllers, in all actuality, they’re limited by their PCI bus speed and therefore are still only ATA100 at best. (I've actually seen a test of this, where the drive stays at 133 mbps for like 2 seconds as the buffer is used up and the data starts backing up, and then immediately drops to like 60 or 70 sustained). So thats the main reason I looked to the new SiS chipset.

SATA is mainly a concern for upgradability, I would like to be able to run the supposed ATA150 drives this supports some day (the current version of serial only supports this speed tops, but eventually they will be like 300 mbps or something, but it would be nice to atleast be able to get the 150 someday right?)

I actually havn’t read much about on-board sound acting up at high FSB but I can imagine it would, I hate having things on a board that I’m not using though, seems like a waste to me (which is why I refuse to buy a board with on-board video, it would bother me to know I payed for it and wasn’t ever going to use it) I guess I’ll look into cards for that as you said.

My friend has a firewire card she would give me if I didn’t get it built-in, so I guess I’m okay there.

LAN isn’t important to me right now, but I have a feeling I will use it in the future (I’ve never done the LAN party thing but I definitely would if I got the opportunity) That’s one of those things that I could wait until it started acting odd at high speeds and then go buy it when I need it.

AGP 8x isn’t too important today (I cant afford the cards), I’ll stick with a Ti4200, but SOMEDAY, yet again, I would like to upgrade to it, if it becomes the future for the best video cards.

RAID isn’t important to me if I can get the ATA133 running, but if I go with the Intel set RAID 0 on two ATA100’s would make the most sense for speed, but RAID 1 or 0+1 would be pointless for me since I will be keeping backups of all my important data on CD as often as possible anyway.

I agree on legacy free, I don’t remember why I put that on there, probably just because I don’t like seeing empty ports not being used for anything.

And, I thought Intel wasn’t giving up on RDRAM yet? Didn’t they recently say they were supporting the new DDR’s and RDRAM equally? RDRAM is the best out right now, and no board I buy today will support the future DDR’s so that’s out of my consideration. DDR is cheaper though for now so it kind of balances the two out for me.

If I was to go Intel, I really like the IT7 and I heard it overclocks very nicely too, but you should check out the giga-byte and maybe the Shuttle AS45GTR and tell me what you think there. I don’t NEED to overclock very high, but if I could, it would be nice

Kerry

I have built 30 or so machines on the GA8-SR533 board, the 645DX version. Looking at the pics it is very much like the 648 version. I use these boards for school system bids because they are the cheapest SiS board out there, save the ECS (pure junk). They seem a bit thin, and deform a scary amount under the cpu when you clamp the reatail heatsink down. As noted in the SG667 reviews the bios is incredibly bare, looking like an unfinished product. Although I have had no failures and they seem to work fine I rate these boards as suitable for "normal" workaday computers, not overclocked hot rod personal machines. They just seem cheap and have no overclocking features compared to something like a P4S533.

ATA133 is useless because modern drives only muster around 50MB/s from the disk media. Anytime you see anything like 100MB/s much less 133 you are reading from the buffer. The only drives out there that support ATA133 are the Maxtors, and they aren't the fastest available units. In addition they only have 2MB buffers, so simple math shows us that at 133MB/s it will take only 15ms to dump the buffer, not 2 seconds. In reality the amount of time you read from the buffer is limited and increasing the interface speed far in excess of the drive's physical speed does hardly anything to help real world performance.

The truth is even the best disks on the market, the WD JB 8MB buffer series (of which there is a new 40GB member!) are ATA100 for a reason, more just isn't necessary. As Maxtor tries to differentiate its products in the market it produces ATA133 devices and says "hey, look ours is 33 bigger than theirs!". It merits consideration as to whether any more is needed though. Just like Via and Sis's push to AGP 8X, ATA133 is and will be unecessary for the next few product cycles and is present in today's devices to try to gain sales, not increase the utility the user realizes.

All disk drives only provide ~50MB/s on the outermost tracks. Across the majority of the disk's surface, substantially less is possible. By the time you reach the innermost tracks the data transfer rate is usually halved. If you are into video editing you definately need to build a RAID, as it is the only way to increase the (somewhat problematic) level of performance on the inner tracks to a level high enough to prevent dropped frames. Upping the interface speed is no substitute, it was never the limiting factor. If you want to learn about storage subsystems in more detail, check out www.storagereview.com. There are also some good links in the storage area of this forum in the stickies. My personal recommendation would be a Promise Fasttrak (either 100 or 133, simply doesn't matter) along with 4 WD 40 or 80GB JB series drives in RAID 0/1 mode. This would give you 80 or 160 GB in storage, the absolute best performance, and redundancy. If funds do not allow use 2 or 4 drives striped alone, withouth the mirror. It will give great speed but no redundancy in trade for the 50% drive cost savings per MB.

Intel announced at the IDF they would develop no more RDRAM chipsets for the desktop market. *poof* gone The only area where RDRAM dominates is pure bandwidth, and the dual channel DDR setups address this concern along with maintaining the otherwise positive attributes of sdram.

Personally, I would not recommend shuttle products. They are very cheap (like ECS) and have not proven suitable in my experience. Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, MSI, and DFI have all proven reliable products of quality, but ****tle is not a brand I can recommend.

Best of luck with your project. It appears the only thing you need is a distrust of specifications Seldom does a single number tell us anything meaningful about topics as complex as computer systems, the system as a whole is not characterized well by them. Bear in mind that as these motherboards cost a mere 75 to 150 dollars, they can be replaced at any time. People kill themselves trying to choose a motherboard that will last forever, and don't seem to mind a bit spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on the components that they plug into them, and don't mind doing so two or three times over the life of the board. If or when AGP 8X does us any good at all, replace the board. It will be long in the tooth for other reasons, trust me. And just like now, the value the new motherboard brings is unmatched by any other single upgrade component you can buy. Don't look at as though you might have to upgrade the mb, but that you GET to upgrade it. This is the best value out there, don't spend one dime or make one compromise to try to prolong the boards life. Use it till it's done, and replace it.