The Economical Way to a Pentium 4 System: Five Motherboards with the SiS648 Chipset

Summary: MSI Dominates, Elitegroup Underestimated

Even before we began testing, we could have easily assumed that an 850E would be impossible to beat. What’s all the more amazing, then, is that the difference is almost zero in several of the benchmarks. The average performance of the five test candidates in 3D games was only modestly behind that of the 850E reference system.

In the benchmarks, it is mostly Elitegroup and MSI that dominate. Elitegroup has a reason to celebrate, because the board is respectably equipped and could easily be counted among the most attractive in terms of price. MSI struts its stuff and equips the 648 Max with Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth interface, with the attitude "the sooner the better."

AOpen also offers a balanced product with good features and standard results. For minimalists, the Gigabyte board is still interesting : apart from a sound system, it does not include any additional price-enhancing components.

The SiS chipset made a brave showing, offering a lot of performance for comparatively little money (from about $100). If you look more closely at the high reliability of the SiS648 motherboard, it looks as though the manufacturers have worked more intensely with the SiS chipset. And maybe some of us should do the same !

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