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Gigabyte GA-8S655TX Ultra Motherboard Review
Historically, Intel processors work best with Intel chipsets. There was a brief period where VIA captured some of
the Pentium III chipset market, but that was short lived. In the Pentium 4 world
there haven't really been many real mainstream alternatives to Intel's own chipsets, that is until very recently.
SiS have
had a Pentium 4 licence since the very beginning, though it has taken
the company a long time to shed their image as an 'economy-oriented' provider and release
a competitive Pentium4 core logic for the tue masses. The
SIS645/FX, SIS648/FX and now SIS655/FX/TX have all been good chipsets which do easily rival
their Intel counterparts in performance, but yet, consumers still aren't familiar enough with the SIS
name to flock towards boards based on its' chipsets - even when they do reveal
remarkably competitive performance figures.
Gigabyte has released a few Pentium 4 motherboards based
on the SIS655FX, or variant chipset, and for good reasons. While the SIS655
performs on par with Intel's latest i865 chipset, SiS' products are generally less expensive, thus motherboards are also more
affordable. If that isn't good news for the consumer I don't know what
is!
The Gigabyte GA-8S655TX Ultra motherboard PCStats
is testing today supports Socket 478 400/533/800 MHz FSB Pentium
4/Celeron processors. Packing in four DDR memory DIMM slots, the board lets you
stock up on up to 4GB of PC3200 RAM. In terms of onboard goodies, the 8S655TX features an onboard IDE
RAID controller, 5.1 channel audio, IEEE 1394, Gigabit LAN and dual BIOS's.
As you probably already know, the SIS655-series chipset supports SiS' HyperStreaming Engine
which can dramatically speed up communications between the memory and the northbridge.
As you will see in the benchmarks on the coming pages,
that plays a significant role in how the Gigabyte GA-8S655TX Ultra handles.
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