Conclusion
If you were to take a poll asking what is it that you require in a motherboard, you'd probably find attributes such as stability, features, performance and price topping the lists. This is perhaps the premise that SiS' engineers set out upon when designing the 648/963 combination.
Stability was excellent throughout the gamut of benchmarks and general testing. The 13 hours of full load, at strict memory timings, helped assuage fears of SiS' engineers being too bold with the overall design. Stability is my primary concern when judging motherboards, the 648/963 combination does well here.
I've already commented upon the 963 South Bridge as being perhaps the most feature-rich ever. Support for 6 USB2.0 ports, 3 IEEE1394a (Firewire) ports, ATA133, 6-channel stereo, LAN and modem is available. It is up to motherboard manufacturers to decide what they implement. The North Bridge is currently unique in support for 8x AGP cards, SiS' own Xabre GPU and the imminent Radeon 9700 should take advantage of this increased speed.
Performance was excellent, too. The very fact that I could run my memory at DDR400 (unofficially supported) with excellent stability showed that tangible performance gains are to be had over the incumbent DDR333 specification. The 648, coupled with DDR400 RAM, is the fastest chipset I've seen. Performance was strong throughout our varied benchmarks.
SiS, unlike VIA, have a valid license to produce chipsets for the Pentium4. With this in mind, we already see all the major motherboard manufacturers sport a SiS645DX motherboard in their range. The SiS648 should arouse even more interest due to the level of integration offered. We've already had word of ABIT, MSI and Shuttle announcing models based on the 648/963 combination. I'm sure that all other respected manufacturers will shortly follow with their implementations.
Price has always been an attribute that SiS have historically done well on. The idea of a feature-packed SiS648 motherboard, from a respected manufacturer, at under £100 is more than feasible if current pricing is anything to go by.
I can't help but be impressed by this offering. It seems to amalgamate all the good points of the various P4 chipsets currently on offer into one motherboard. I for one cannot wait to see full production motherboards bearing all the features that this chipset can deliver.
On a final note, do yourself a favour and forget the name behind the chipset, just evaluate it on its considerable merits.
