This Taiwanese chip maker is making great strides, as opposed to its other competitors in Taiwan. After SiS came back on the market with its 735 chipset for the AMD platform over a year ago, other interesting new developments followed in quick succession.

In addition, VIA is stuck in a difficult situation with its chipsets for the P4 platform: the manufacturer has no license to sell its chips to motherboard makers, as is the case with the P4X series. This leaves them with no choice but to offer corresponding boards under its own label.

SiS 648 reference board with DDR400 support for Pentium 4: excellent performance along with good stability.

SiS has the better starting position: this company acquired a license for the P4 platform early on. Our lab results show that SiS currently offers the best memory interface for the P4 platform in terms of performance. Not even Intel's 845G chipset with DDR333 memory can stand up to the competition from Taiwan, even though the 845G already offers good performance to begin with. However, it's not just the pure performance scores that impress at first glance. SiS sent us a reference board with the 648 chipset, which contains new features.

Reference board with the SiS 648 chipset.