SiS 645 or i845D?

Can anyone help me choose between the two? They both look great, but the only thing that's keeping me from making a decision is the fact that I don't know how stable the SiS is. I know some of you own the SiS board, so can you tell me if it has any issues you know or suspect thus far? It seems to get great scores in sandra, and looks like a great RAM performer, faster than the i845D but slower than the i850 (rambus). Overclocking looks to be about the same. Anyway, can someone give me some advice?

I've pretty much narrowed my decision to the Abit BD7 or SD7-533...pick a chipset.

No problems for me so far. I have a skimpy system only 2hd's and a cdrw, sound card. No usb,dvd,ect.

I think if you overclock the rdram will be faster as long as the rambus can get the fsb you desire.

If you have to buy memory either choice I would go for rambus myself.

I already have lot's of ddr so I picked SiS.

The SiS in a heartbeat. The i845 is a real old chipset that really lacks in performance. Though it is very stable, but the SIS equals the 850 chipset and is just as stable as either the 845 or 850. Personally I would take the Soyo SY-P4S Dragon Ultra. A smokin board.

Ok I'm going to buy the SiS (SD7-533). I'm just apprehensive about buying it because of my past experience with third-party chipsets.

**COUGH_COUGH_VIA_COUGH**

The SiS 645 is definetly not a crappy VIA product. It is stable like Intel chipsets with high OCing.

BTW I would seriously consider what RB said, the Soyo SY-P4S Dragon Ultra, its considered the current flagship of all SiS645 motherboards produced to date. Abit is great for Athlon products, but I have never been impressed with their Intel lineup at all. Im sure a few people on this board will back me on this too.

That board goes for over $150...

Yeah; people have to keep in mind that SiS's difficulties in the past couple years weren't caused by crappy, slow, or incompatible products. They simply couldn't build enough of them; fabrication was SiS's primary big problem. Back quite a few years ago, SiS was actually THE preferred chipset to have for 486es and Pentiums and the like.

99% of people I've heard from have had huge success with the Socket A 735 boards (a-la ECS K7S5A), and now people are having good luck with the 645 boards for Pentium 4. I own a 645 board, and it's pretty flash. It's faster than competing Intel DDR chipsets, quite a bit cheaper, and there is real DDR333 support, in case you have that stick of PC2700 at home already.

Not sure about ALi and VIA for the P4, but the Intel is very solid, and the SiS surely gives it a run for its money.

I chickened out and went with the i845D. My ASUS P4B266-C should be here in a week.

Still not a bad choice either way; Asus knows well how to implement chipsets, and it's bound to be a solid, reliable board. Good luck with your system!

Thanks.

The SiS does perform slightly better than an 845 chipset. However, the SiS is designed with a .25 micron die in the standard BGA setting. The 845 is a .18 micron die with a flip chip setting. From everything I have seen the SiS chipset is struggling to hit a 150MHz fsb stable, while the 845 (Asus P4B266) is hammering 150-160MHz fsb with ease, provided the 1.6a Northwood is up to the challenge.

rogue1979 said:

The SiS does perform slightly better than an 845 chipset. However, the SiS is designed with a .25 micron die in the standard BGA setting. The 845 is a .18 micron die with a flip chip setting. From everything I have seen the SiS chipset is struggling to hit a 150MHz fsb stable, while the 845 (Asus P4B266) is hammering 150-160MHz fsb with ease, provided the 1.6a Northwood is up to the challenge.

Click to expand...

Good news for me, as extreme FSB speeds are in mind with this system.

Man, I hate waiting for parts.

I dunno where people get that an 845 chipset even comes close to performing as well as an SiS 645 A2 chipset. The 845's performance is a lame duck. Its ancient technology by todays standard. And its also been shown to be a huge bottleneck for Northwood processors. Tomshardware, Anadtech, and Hot Hardware reviews all give the 845 thumbs down in actually performance. The Sis is on the same leve as the 850 chipset, beating it some benchmarks(very close scores) and losing in a few also(again very close comparable scores).

Skyy, if you plan on trying to get performance from your Northwood processor, forget it. If you OC it past a certain point, you will find how PC2100 holds it back in the 845 chipset. If you are looking for just plain stability, then the 845 will suit you on lower speed Northwood processors. But if you are looking for serious OCing, and performance along with great stability, then you made the wrong choice. You should have gotten an SiS 645 A2 chipset or an Intel 850 chipset. As they are better suited for bandwidth needs. My family owns a wholesale computer parts store. Well sell alot of all kinds of makes etc. 845 is great for business users or those who just want stability, but for "Enthusiast" We always recommend the SiS or 850 platforms. They are both very comperable in performance, OCing and the stability is still just as good. The 845 is an older chipset that will be phased out quickly by Intel within the next few quarters.

Also, rogue is basing his points on the first version of the SiS 645. The 645 A2 chipset will hit around 170 range without a hitch. My own personal rig has a 1.6 Northwood OCed to roughly 2.5. Again even if an 845 can OC this high, the memory will hold back the processor making the OCing virtually worthless anyway.

Here is one link to a Soyo mobo.

http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/mainboard/p4s.htm

I have been told by countless people to only run intel on intel. The SiS chipset looked nice, but I don't trust third-parties after I've been through a year of hell with VIA. And about performance--I could care less about a slightly higher bar in memory bandwidth. The i845D is almost as fast as the SiS645--you're making it seem like the intel chipset is a complete dog, and that's just not true. It does excellent in all of the benchmarks, falling slightly behind the SiS645 in Sandra memory bandwidth. However, the i845D overclocks more on average, and that does push it ahead of the SiS in benchmarks that aren't about memory bandwidth. Besides, either of these chipsets with an overclocked 1.6A will still smoke an overclocked Athlon XP.

So what if the i845D is slightly slower than the SiS645--I'm just glad I don't have to deal with VIA + AMD anymore. I've come to the realization that having less third-party hardware in my computer will only make it more stable in the end.

Not entirely true. See, I give an unbiased opinion based on facts from products I sell and use. I deal with hundreds of end users and business custoerms each week. As we specialize in parts and custom rigs. THe 845 chipset has nothing more than a good stable platform. It is NOT a performance chipset, nor is it geared towards it. If it was, I would be running one myself in my own rigs at home. But benchmarks only tell one story. And many of those "benchmarks" that you were witnessing was when PC2100 RAM was used in the SiS 645 chipset. Of course they are going to be similiar then, as they use identical memory for the most part. If you want more links showing the "age" of the 845, I will be glad to post them. SiS is definetly NOT VIA. And SiS has never put out a "bunk" chipset either. You forget, SiS's 645 chipset was designed by them along with Intel engineers, hence their great stability and reliability, as much so as the 845 and 850 chipset. Intel also gave SiS full cooperation on design and marketing. SiS has always done things by the book with CPU makers, that is why they are highly regarded. But the 845 has many limitations. One being bandwith. This isnt a concern on older 478 Intels. But the Northwoods are geared to hit around 3 gigs and beyond. And its proven that PC2100 will limit the Intel Northwood as they are bandwidth hungry. This is where Rambus RAM and PC2700 come into play. The SiS 645 chipset runs PC2700, the 845 does not. ANd when you get into higher speed processors based on Northwood. PC2100 becomes obsolete. Even if you still feel like you dont trust 3rd party chipset makers, you would have been better off getting an 850 chipset equiped motherboard. Especially for Northwood processors. Also, since all those older reviews of when the SiS645 came out, as was mentioned, the tests used DDR PC2100 in the test, now there is a new revision of the Northbridge, that allows an even higher memory bandwidth of the Northbridge. Its the SiS 645 A2. THis allows 3 banks to be populated at a CAS 2 setting. Using Kingmax 5ns BGA PC2700 memory running at CAS 2 equals almost 1 full gig of bandwidth over current PC2100.

Regardless, I will put up some articles of the 845's shortcomings.

Here is an older article from Tom's. And this article is using the original A1 Northbridge from SiS's 645 chipset, which is aprox. 15 percent down in performance over the A2 revision. And still it is in the top 1 or 2 spots in everything but Linux applications.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011217/index.html

Here is an article on Kingmax DDR 300, its not even the 333 stuff, but gives you an idea of what a platform is capable of when it is made to incorperate DDR 333.

http://www.ocaddiction.com/reviews/memory/kingmaxPC2400/


Here is a "World Exclusive" review of the Iwill P4D over at OCTools. This is an i845D board powered by the Pentium 4.

Using the P4 1.6A Northwood, the highest stable overclock we can get using the P4D is 2.16 GHz at 135mhz fsb. No matter how we lower the memory settings or increase the voltage, it just would'nt boot up after 135mhz fsb. Amazingly though, the CPU would still ran everything rock solid up to that speed even at 1.4v. We tried increasing the voltage up to 1.85v but that didn't do anything. We even tried auto voltage and it still wouldn't boot.

Has anyone seen any of the i845D boards reach over a 136MHz FSB OC? I am wondering if we are not seeing chipset limitations here...

This comment above was made on the front page of Hardocp.com. One of the few places online I trust. They have also concluded that the 845d is already on its way out, just when it was "reintroduced".

Actually, I would rather get the SiS 645 in the form of the Epox EP-4SDA for only $94 shipped at newegg. However, is the the A2 revision? Also I have been watching overclocks with the SiS 645 boards form Gigabyte, Abit, Epox and MSI. Using the 1.6a I have yet to see one person hit a 150MHz fsb. While it seems people using the Asus P4B266 are hitting 150MHz+ everytime. I would buy the SiS 645 board in one second if I could find reasonable proof that it can hit a 150MHz fsb easily. Can you post some more links with the 645 vs 845 comparison? All the ones I have seen show the 645 consistently ahead, but only by 1 or 2%, which is not gonna make up for the loss of 200-300MHz when overclocking the 1.6a.