About SiS R658 Performance.

by Anton Shilov
03/26/2003 | 05:41 AM

Silicon Integrated Systems, whose R658 core-logic set was reported as RDRAM messiah on the PC market made quite a lot of fuss about six months ago. The chipset was announced in Summer, however, no mainboard makers launched mainboards based on the first SiS’ RDRAM solution. The only manufacturer who expressed interest in the product was ABIT, who unleashed its SI7 earlier this year.

GamePC web-site reviewed the one and only SiS R658-based mainboard and found out the following:

• In SiSoft Sandra 2003 SP1 CPU Arithmetic Benchmark the R658 with 32-bit PC1066 RDRAM memory module was ahead of E7205 (dual-channel PC2100) and i850E (dual-channel PC1066 RDRAM), but was outperformed by SiS655 with dual-channel PC2700 memory.
• In SiSoft Sandra 2003 SP1 Memory Bandwidth Benchmark the Rambus’ and SiS’ baby was well-behind of E7205, SiS655 and the champion i850E.
• The R658 was also surpassed by all the rivals in Unreal Performance Test 2003 in 1024x768x32 Flyby and Bot-match modes.
• Intel i850E with PC1066 RDRAM remained unsurpassed in RTCW MP Demo in 1024x768x32 mode using ATdemo8, but at this time SiS R658 managed to show better results compared to the competitors that utilise DDR SDRAM memory.
• In the famous demo4 from Quake III Arena in 1024x768x32 mode the R658 powered system was much slower than i850E and SiS655, but was a bit faster when compared to E7205.
• SiS R658 was the slowest in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Filter Test and Alias|Wavefront Maya 4.02 Render Test.

The configuration of the test-bed was a mainstream Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor, 512MB of memory and RADEON 9700 PRO graphics card.

As you see, RDRAM chipset from SiS cannot boast with very high performance as well as lacks 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus support. Intel expects its Springdale chipset to be faster than the current-generation i850E with PC1066 memory, what will eventually kill not only Intel’s own RDRAM solution, but also SiS’ product. In fact, no one is going to be upset about this, as only ABIT plans to sell such mainboards and that is why they will be presented very narrowly on the market and without support for future processors, the SI7 will hardly be a good buy.