SiS745 Reference board (1)
Overclocker 28 Feb 2002

Still remember our first review of the ECS K7S6A (SiS745) ? We reviewed it a few weeks ago. In fact at that time, we were surprised that the results obtained were lower than the Leadtek 7350KDA which is a SiS735 mainboard. Both boards were tweaked to the maximum possible BIOS settings and yet the 745 lose to the 735.

Earlier last week, I phoned SiS Inc in Taipei and told them my test results. They are surprised by my findings as they feel that the SiS745 should be better than then SiS735 in terms of performance. I asked SiS if they could send me a reference board for comparing the results and they agreed and sent me the SiS 745 Demo board which we are going to investigate today.

So what is SiS745 ? Basically, SiS745 is an extension of the SiS735 with support of Firewire and DDR333. To date, none of the manufacturers who has released their boards implemented Firewire option. The few mainboard manufacturers that will be releasing SiS745 boards are ECS, MSI, ECS, AOPEN, ABIT and others. MSI is going to release 745Ultra that features on board Firewire (Specs are subjected to changes without prior notice).

SiS745 , 1st Integrated 1394A with DDR333 Chipset for AMD Athlon™ XP Platform

Host Interface Controller
- Support AMD Athlon™ XP/Athlon™/Duron™ CPUs
- 266 MHz Front-Side Bus

Integrated DDR SDRAM Controller
- Up to 3 DIMMs of DDR333/DDR266
- Maximum 3GB System Memory
- Suspend-to-RAM (STR)

MuTIOLR Delivering 1.2GB/s Bandwidth
- Dedicated High-Speed Data Paths Connecting North-Bridge and Each South-Bridge Masters Including IDE, USB, Audio, and Modem Controllers
- Concurrent External PCI Devices and Embedded Devices Transactions

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

Integrated Audio/Modem Controllers with AC'97 Interface
- Support AC'97 v2.2 Audio Codec and v.90 Modem Codec

1394 Open Host Controller
- Support 1394 Transfer Rates of 100/200/400 Mb/s
- Support up to 3 Ports

Advanced Power Management
- ACPI 1.0b and APM 1.2 Compliant

Dual USB OpenHCI Host Controllers with 6 USB Ports
Dual IDE Channels with ATA 100/66/33
Support Up to 6 PCI Masters
LPC 1.0 Interface
Integrated RTC
Integrated Keyboard/PS2 Mouse Controller
PC2001 Compliant

Before we look at the results obtain in comparison to other boards and chipset, we have prepare a gallery of the mainboard for your viewing in the next 2 pages

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