SiS. SiS has rarely been known as the company to be reckoned with. For the last year or so, SiS has largely disappeared, when it comes to coverage on hardware review sites. The reasoning, primarily, has been that SiS's offerings have in the past been lackluster, highly integrated products, designed for the low end market. While there's nothing wrong with this (after all, someone has to do it), SiS's products typically have not had much appeal to the performance/gaming sector.

Fast forward to today. We are in the beginnings of a market shift to DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is now just about at price parity with standard SDRAM DIMM modules, so for those building new systems, DDR SDRAM is probably going to be what you'll want to be using.

In the Socket370 arena, Intel still has nothing available of course. We'll all be glad when they can begin to step out of bed with RAMBUS. VIA's Pro-266 is available, and now so is SiS's 635. I've already played with a few examples of the VIA Pro-266, at this point.

In SocketA by comparison (not surprisingly) we have a number of options. VIA's KT266, AMD's 760, Ali's MaGiK1, and now SiS's 735 DDR. SiS's 735DDR is my first foray into the DDR world on SocketA.

First, let's take a look at the specifications of these two very similar chipsets, and then we'll take a look at the boards themselves, and run some benchmarks.

Where the typical North/South bridge chipset arrangement limits available bandwidth to 133Mb/sec (266MB/sec on VIA's newer VLINK utilized on the KT266, and on Intel's ICH2), SiS's integrated "Super Southbridge" utilizes 8 pipelines concurrently (4 upstream/4 downstream) for a maximum of 1.2Gb/sec. While not in the same league as say, Serverworks chipsets, this is a SIGNIFICANT improvement in overall bandwidth available on standard desktop chipsets.

Let's build some systems, and see what's what...