If you remember one year ago, SIS 735 stormed the market with ECS K7S5A. If you remember, the SiS 735 at that point of time performs better than KT266A and its low price captured lots of attention. VIA came out with KT333 and KT400 but the low price of SiS 735 still sells very well. SiS 748 came a bit late as the market is now flooded with nForce2 boards which most first tier manufacturers are manufacturing. The problem is that SiS always fail to capture the attention of many except its P4 boards. This resulted in boards that comes real cheap but lack of overclocking functions or RAID.

Will SiS 748 be another success this time round competiting head to head with nForce2 and the less known KT400A ? Well, considering the performance of the SiS 748, the SiS 748 might capture low costs SI vendors and also enthusiasts which requires low cost board for stable performance. SiS 748 shows marvellous performance in disk related desktop applications in the CCWS and BWS benchmark. This is to be expected as the older 746/746FX displayed very good disk access scores. In terms of 3D applications, the difference is only merely within 1-3% in most benchmarks except in Quake 3 which is an OpenGL application. The memory performance also shows higher bandwidth using a 3000+ compared to a 3200+, this is strange and i think the BIOS has to be sorted out.

In conclusion, we find that SiS 748 gives us an indication of where the performance stands among the different chipset. SiS K7 solutions has been quite well accepted by most 2nd tier manufacturers has cost down solutions for both channels and SI market. We hope to see more boards based on this new chipset and consumers will have a wider selection of boards to choose from.

We would recommend this as a good price/performance chipset.

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