Conclusion
Reviewing prototype motherboards has formerly been quite a piece of work. Not this one. No hang ups, no driver issues. Everything was just like with a fully matured product. I guess SiS spend a lot of time optimizing and refining the chipset, as there was seemingly no need to rush it to the market as fast.
The result is just what the business sector needed: A relatively fast, reliable and well-featured chipset. No other manufacturer offers a product with the same feature range as the SiS630 and SiS730 family.
Even though SiS engineers rely on the Windows default IDE drivers, I'm sure that specialized ones can improve the overall performance some more. There might also be some room for optimizing the memory performance as well. If you think about chipset comparisons of the whole last decade, SiS might be in a good situation. This time there is no competiting chipset from Intel to outperform the SiS product.
Finally the low value/budget segment has now two different Athlon/Duron chipsets to pick from, VIA's ProSavage KM133 and the SiS730. I expect the SiS to be cheaper though better featured. With those two chipsets available, the business computing sector is no longer depending on Intel chipsets or processors. There is even more behind it. The value of a business computer is increased by an AMD Duron processor. You get a faster processor, faster memory and a better featured chipset for the same price - isn't that a good deal?
The home and performance-desktop sector was the first of three areas to be entered by AMD, now AMD has good chances to enter the value segment. This leaves only one major part still free from AMD processors: Workstations and Server systems. That will change once AMD gets the AMD760-MP chipset ready to go.
