The new SiS 761GX Northbridge chipset was actually designed with the Athlon64 X2 and Athlon64 FX (both Socket 939) in mind. However as AMD built the memory controller directly into the K8 processor, the SIS 761GX can effectively be used with any existing Athlon64/Sempron processor platform.

The SiS 761GX chipset natively supports a PCI Express bus, but its most notable feature is the integrated SIS Mirage 1 graphics core.

The SiS 761GX supports up to a 1 GHz (2 GHz in full duplex mode) HyperTransport connection between an AMD K8 processor and the northbridge. For the Foxconn WinFast 761GXK8MC-S motherboard this connection operates at 800 MHz, like all other socket 754 chipsets. The SiS 761GX supports a total of sixteen PCI Express lanes. In its implementation on the 761GXK8MC-S motherboard, all sixteen lanes are dedicated to the PCI Express x16 slot for a stand alone videocard.

To be frank, the integrated SIS Mirage 1 graphics core is nothing special. As integrated graphics go, it is totally sufficient for workstation applications that need a good 2D display. The Mirage 1 is only DirectX 7.0 compliant, so realistically it won't handle 3D games with any real grace.... then again virtually no integrated solution on the market offers gamers decent frame rates either.

What is worth noting is that the SIS Mirage 1 has a built in MPEG2/DVD accelerator, as well as support for High Definition video. Its direct competition, the nVidia GeForce 6100, supports standard definition video only.

Foxconn has decided to equip its WinFast 761GXK8MC-S motherboard with the SiS 964 Southbridge instead of the newer 966. Connecting the Northbridge and Southbridge is a bi-directional 16 bit bus that operates at 533 MHz. It provides 1GB/s worth of bandwidth. The SiS 964 southbridge incorporates two Serial ATA channels and can run RAID modes 0 and 1. It also integrates a 10/100 MAC, modem codec and 5.1 channel audio codec.

We are going to skip the usual overclocking section as the microATX Foxconn WinFast 761GXK8MC-S motherboard is not equipped for this manner of use. The board has a top speed of 206 MHz, which we had no problems engaging.