Page 1: Intro, Stuff
<B>Intro</B>:
For about two months now, I've had my hands on the 655FX. I just haven't had the time to get down to reviewing the board due to school and work (By the way, expect more Crummy Computers soon). I digress, let's get back to business. <a href="http://www.sis.com">SiS</a> has sent me two reference boards, so we will get right into the first one based on the 655FX. This one targets the Intel Springdale/Canterwood market, it offers dual channel Memory support and all the other bells and whistles.
<B>Box</B>:
No box... moving on.
<B>How it works</B>:
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The 655FX offers a multitude of features, comparatively the same as the Intel Springdale chipset. The northbridge connects to the Video card at AGP 8x speeds, it also offers AGP 3.5 Specs. This time around, the 655FX is a dual channel DDR chipset. This was the thing that hurt the 648FX in terms of performance, but now we are on equal turf. The chipset also supports the latest HT enabled Pentium 4s. I have also seen from SiS' site that it will support Prescott as well. The north and the southbridge are connected through a 1GB/s link called MuTIOL.
<B>The board</B>:
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</center>
Since this is a reference board, I won't go into much detail on this section as I'm more concerned with how the chipset handles itself rather than how it looks.
<center>
</center>
It looks like a normal board at first, but then you can see the weirdness! First of all, there are connections at the bottom of the board, most likely for testing the chipset and other things. You'll also notice that the Power connector is in the middle of the AGP slot and the PCI slots. Now, this is just me (
), but I think board makers will change this on production boards. This board supports four DDR modules.
<center>
</center>
The CPU area is pretty clean, other than the capacitors around one side. But like I said, let's not get into great detail of the board.
<center>
</center>
And here we see that the board offers the basic ports that all other boards offer. A quick note, the ethernet card on the board did not work. It sent packets, but didn't receive them. Good thing I wasn't reviewing the board
.
For about two months now, I've had my hands on the 655FX. I just haven't had the time to get down to reviewing the board due to school and work (By the way, expect more Crummy Computers soon). I digress, let's get back to business. <a href="http://www.sis.com">SiS</a> has sent me two reference boards, so we will get right into the first one based on the 655FX. This one targets the Intel Springdale/Canterwood market, it offers dual channel Memory support and all the other bells and whistles.
<B>Box</B>:
No box... moving on.
<B>How it works</B>:
<center>
</center>The 655FX offers a multitude of features, comparatively the same as the Intel Springdale chipset. The northbridge connects to the Video card at AGP 8x speeds, it also offers AGP 3.5 Specs. This time around, the 655FX is a dual channel DDR chipset. This was the thing that hurt the 648FX in terms of performance, but now we are on equal turf. The chipset also supports the latest HT enabled Pentium 4s. I have also seen from SiS' site that it will support Prescott as well. The north and the southbridge are connected through a 1GB/s link called MuTIOL.
<B>The board</B>:
<center>
</center>Since this is a reference board, I won't go into much detail on this section as I'm more concerned with how the chipset handles itself rather than how it looks.
<center>
</center>It looks like a normal board at first, but then you can see the weirdness! First of all, there are connections at the bottom of the board, most likely for testing the chipset and other things. You'll also notice that the Power connector is in the middle of the AGP slot and the PCI slots. Now, this is just me (
), but I think board makers will change this on production boards. This board supports four DDR modules.<center>
</center>The CPU area is pretty clean, other than the capacitors around one side. But like I said, let's not get into great detail of the board.
<center>
</center>And here we see that the board offers the basic ports that all other boards offer. A quick note, the ethernet card on the board did not work. It sent packets, but didn't receive them. Good thing I wasn't reviewing the board
.