Anybody using Asus P4S8X Mobo yet

[Tom Burgess]

A week or so ago, Dr Mordrid suggsted the P4S8X with the SiS 648/693 chipset.

I'm sure Dr M knows his stuff, and I want to grab up one of these new boards yesterday (somebody hold me back!), but I'm extremely gun-shy about this build...

So is anybody using the P4S8X yet. If so, please advise.

Thanks,
Tom Burgess

[Dr Mordrid]

Tip: several board makers using the SiS 648, by documentation a DDR333 chipset, are including stealth DDR400 support. ABIT for one, but given their history of quality you might want to wait for some of the others on the below list to weigh in;

http://www.sis.com/wheretobuy/648cus.htm

Here's something else for you to think about: the SiSR658.

Think in terms of the 648 but with the ability to use either 800mhz or 1066mhz RDRAM.

http://www.sis.com/press/sisr658.htm

Dr. Mordrid

[lecter]

SiS with RDRAM performs worse than i845E in most benchmarks and is not as fast as i850E in the others...a useless chipset if ever I saw one.

[Tom Burgess]

Thanks Dr M. I'll see what I can find out, but I probably won't wait for DDR400. This has been backburnered for too long now. Please weigh in on the following question to Lecter.

Lecter ==
Maybe so (I don't know). If so, then would you please briefly compare these two combinations:

a) SiS 648/693 with DDR333
b) Intel850E with RIMM4200.

Which is faster? Do you consider them equally stable in general terms - and more specifically, in terms of running the Matrox RT.X100?

Thanks,
Tom Burgess

[Dr Mordrid]

lecter;

The key reason for many people moving to SiS's chipsets is that they have very high PCI bandwidth. For those of us who have real world experience using high bandwidth hardware this means you can install and simultaneously use more than one such card (often more than two) without them stepping on one another.

This is distinctly non-trivial for those using realtime or high bitrate editing boards, fast RAID arrays, PCI audio cards that are high latency (Creative etc.), gigabit NIC's and so on.

The fact that SiS chipsets make up 1/3 of those on the recommended list for the very high bandwidth RT.X100 board speaks volumes about this. The AMD 760 and i815EP only made the "minimum requirements" list, but not the "recommended" list and VIA was shut out (big suprise there 'eh? )

Software benchmarks cannot emulate this mode of operation unless there is such hardware installed and and the benchmark is designed to test it. Hardly any are.

SiS's chipsets also offer comparable *overall performance* (not nitpicking on one or two individual results) to Intels chipsets at a lower price point, which for many people means a lot.

Dr. Mordrid