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While it's always nice to take a look at the cutting edge of new motherboards and CPU's at the highest ends of the scale, it's also nice to check out a few rungs down the ladder and see where the middle ground lies in the PC hardware sector. Not everyone has the means to upgrade constantly and keep their boxes at the top end of the performance ladder.
So rather than look at something new and shiny in this review, I thought we could venture into the mid range and take a look at a board based on a chipset we haven't seen at Hexus before.
Leadtek are the suppliers of the board. While you'll probably associate them, especially recently, with their graphics cards (in particular their monster cooled Ti4400 and Ti4600 offerings), they also have a small range of boards for both AMD Socket A and Intel Socket 478 P4.
On the Socket A side of things, Leadtek only deal in 2 chipset currencies, NVIDIA nForce (415 and 420 based boards) and the chipset that powers the review board, SiS's 735.
SiS735 is a curious chipset for a number of reasons so lets talk about it shortly before moving on to the test board itself.
According to the SiS literature on the 735, the chipset "provides a high performance/low cost Desktop solution for the AMD socketA series CPUs based system by integrating a high performance North Bridge, Super-South bridge and an AGP4X Slot". So it's a bit different from regular chipset solutions that split the chipset into north and south bridges. The description makes it look like the AGP interface is provided seperately in a normal 2-chip solution but that's not the case with the north bridge handling AGP duties on x86 systems.
Integrating the bridges into a single chip solution like this is all about cost. One chip is cheaper to produce than two, even if that single chip is doing the aggregate job of a pair of chips. Boards can be made smaller (less physical room needed for chips and traces) and hence cheaper and SiS's motivation when creating its single chip solutions was a square aim at the value sector of the market.
Leadtek obliged with the Winfast 7350 KDA.
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