SiS 748 Ref Mainboard Gallery 2 Bluetooth 2 June 2003
Gallery 2
The Reference board has the conventional 6 PCI slots and 1 ACR slot which
most retail boards will not implement the ACR since it is not widely used.
There are some dip
switches which are undocumented. Over here we see the voltage regulator
and a possible 3 phase design is implemented.
2 IDE channels
supporting 4 HDD of ATA133. There are two buttons for PowerON and RESET
which is a useful feature for testing boards.
There are 3 DIMM slots
support up to 3GB of RAM.
The new SiS 748 North
Bridge which features Hyperstreaming technology for faster performance.
The 963L South bridge which takes care of the IDE interface, USB 2.0 ports
etc. The North and South with 1GB/s bandwidth which is more than
sufficient for the most demanding I/O. Sometimes I wonder why 963 is not
used since it supports 1394. The SiS 180 that supports software RAID never
makes it to the SIS 748 Ref board. It would be nice if retail boards
support that.
The SIS 748
reference board has many selections turned on which allows you to tune the
BIOS to optimum performance. In our testing, we set it to the above
configuration. CAS 2, 5-2-2. tRC is set to tRAS+tRP+3T to maintain
stability. CAS timing is set to CAS 2. There are optional like R/W Turn
Around time and Read Latency which we use AUTO. Setting it to Fast will
result in system bootup failure.
There are not
much options available on the FSB and CPU:DRAM Clk. They are fixed. CPU
Clock can only be selected from 100,133,166 and 200Mhz. CPU:DRAM Clock
Ratios are basically the same 1:1,5:4 etc.
