SiS 648 - Taking Advantage of the P4 Situation

The Reference Board

Although we were only able to get our hands on two motherboards based on the SiS 648 chipset, there is more support behind this chipset launch than any other previous SiS release. All of the major motherboard manufacturers are scheduled to produce 648 based solutions and will be shipping them before the end of July, with some trailing into August. While this isn’t the ideal case where a chipset launch is paired up with the launch of a handful of motherboards, this is definitely the best we’ve seen from SiS.

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The first board we tested was the SiS 648 Reference board provided by SiS themselves. In SiS’ usual fashion, their reference board is built on a non-ATX form factor that is significantly larger to aid in debugging.

The second board that arrived in our hands based on the 648 chipset was Shuttle’s AS45. We will be providing an individual review of the Shuttle AS45 shortly but the board was worth mentioning here as it was ready by the launch of the chipset.

During our tests we didn’t encounter any stability issues with the reference board.