DFI 748-AL: First Look at SiS 748
by Wesley Fink on August 30, 2003 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
The DFI 748-AL is a motherboard that shows the promise of the SiS 748 chipset. It has a full selection of tweaking and overclocking options that allow the end user to get the most from the 748 chipset. This includes a full working range of multiplier ratios, which have been absent from other SiS 748 designs. The tested board was an engineering sample with an evaluation ROM, but was still remarkably stable in everything we tested. The only glaring weakness was the lack of available memory timing options, which we expect will be fixed in the release BIOS.Even hampered by the current 2.5-4-4-8 timings at DDR400, the 748-AL still performs in the range of VIA KT600 boards. With better memory timings and setting options, it could easily out-perform the KT600 boards we have tested. However, unless there are some major miracles performed in the release BIOS, the DFI 748-AL is not likely to meet or pass the performance of the nForce2 Ultra 400 Athlon motherboards. We did not test hard-disk I/O, but SiS has performed very well in that area with recent chipsets. We suspect that benchmarks which heavily weight disk I/O, like Futuremark’s PCMark2002, will show much closer performance of the nForce2 Ultra 400 and the SiS 748 chipsets than we have found in our testing.
It is likely that DFI will have effective memory control options in the release BIOS, which will definitely improve performance. We also hope there is a way to add a “Fixed PCI/AGP” option to the final BIOS. It is available in other SiS chipsets, so we suspect it may be an option that DFI can incorporate in the final 748 BIOS. For the wish list, an increase of available FSB options from 232 to 250 would also be useful.
We commend DFI for their efforts to bring a full-featured SiS 748 design to market. With the market rolling with the nForce2 snowball, it must be a difficult decision whether to introduce a board like the 748-AL. There is much to like in the SiS 748, and it is certainly a worthwhile product. In the end, we don’t know if that will make much difference, since it does not win the performance crown from nForce2. At it's selling price, the DFI 748-AL is an excellent choice with many unique features provided by the SiS 748 chipset.
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JAGedlion - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
... The DFI 748-AL has 5 IDE ... I see you are referring to PCI slots, can they be called IDE slots too?Anonymous User - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
wonder how far would the FSB go if the vdd was pushed into its max. i guess it would definetly go beyond 212MHz, maybe you should have decreased the multiplier.In fact, today I ran a few benchmarks with my epox 8k5a2 KT333 and reached as far as 215. pushing it further the AGP bus became bottleneck and i was using ATI's oldskool's rage128. it amazes me how come brand new hardware can't handle even 72MHz agp clock, whereas my 4 years old card handles 86MHz. in FSB200 (agp/pci 80/40) i'm not experiencing any staiblity issues burning it with prime or cpuburnK7 even 3days. odd
Anonymous User - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
One can easily see from his comment that Jeff7181 doesn't know much about these things, but still thinks he's got an argument. Anandtech crew are admirably wasting their efforts in trying to reason with such people.About the board. Two phase and no 12V connector drives me away from it just by looking at it.
About SiS. They have nice chipsets, but the motherboard makers skimp on the design because they use the SiS chipsets for another market than they do for instance with their nForce2 boards. That's unfortunate since I would rather go with SiS drivers than nVidias. Performance is often overemphasised when reliability and ease of use becomes a second thought for many buyers.
Anonymous User - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
May i make a helpful suggestion/request for the next (or even current) review? Could you please post the ranges of the bois setting instead of just the maximums? for example, instead of saying "cpu voltage in the full range, up to 1.85v" could you specify exactly what that range is? like 1.1-1.85v? I know the nForce boards can do this, but I'm unclear about 748 boards.I'm personally looking at this board for a home theater PC that I'm going to try and underclock the CPU and see if i can get it to run without a fan and still be fast enough to play DVD's... because of this, I'd like to know the minimum voltage you can run the CPU at, and I don't find that in a lot of reviews. Just that little change would satisfy the speed freaks as well as us quiet freaks.
just a suggestion...
Evan Lieb - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Jeff,As Wesley mentioned and as I said before, Epox and ASUS' nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards perform nearly exactly the same as the Gigabyte and DFI nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards (and others) we use in AMD motherboard reviews. I have both boards in my labs and have decided not to send them to Wesley for retesting because I wouldn't want to waste his time with something like that.
Again, we have tested ASUS and Epox boards before and found them to perform within about 1% of other nForce Ultra 400 motherboards. We changed our testbed and made sure a few good nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards we added for comparison to non-NVIDIA chipsets.
We may add those very popular Epox and ASUS boards to an nForce2 roundup of some type. But for a SiS 748 review like this one, the boards we used were perfectly adequate.
Dennis Travis - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Very good review Wes, keep up the great work.Wesley Fink - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Jeff7181 -I'm asking, Jeff, that you Please give me a break. I took over AMD about 6 weeks ago, and all Athlon reviews prior to that were done by Evan. Evan has answered here, on every post you have made on every AMD review, that the performance difference for Ultra 400 versions was very small, which is why he chose NOT to review the Ultra 400 updates of the boards you mention. The results of our tests of the regular nForce2 versions of the boards you mention are in our database. We also have the two top Ultra 400 performers - the DFI NFII Ultra LANParty and Gigabyte 7NNXP with UPDATED benchmarks in our tests for your comparison. If you recall, we also changed our video cards and benchmark suite recently, and we are finally accumulating a useful database of new benchmark data.
My point, Jeff, is I do NOT have access to the motherboards you mention and cannot add them to our database. I am doing my best to provide useful information to AMD fans, but I cannot provide what you ask. My next AMD review is a Ahtlon64 Preview, and with the launch only 3 weeks away it just doesn't make good use of review time to request an Asus A7N8X Deluxe and retest it.
If you can please show a little patience we will do our best to provide the kind of information you are looking for in the future.
Thank you.
Wesley Fink - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Charts are in Flash because it uses less bandwidth than any of the alternatives. With over 3300 articles and reviews on-line plus News and Forums, bandwidth is a very important subject to a site like AnandTech.Anonymous User - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Why are the charts in Flash? A simple jpg or gif would do.Jeff7181 - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
Again I ask, where the hell is the comparisons to the motherboards we all know? The A7N8X Deluxe, NF-7, 8RDA+. And what's with the cheesy title? Can SIS outperform nVidia's nForce2? I could have answered that without even testing them! Geeze... what's going on at AnandTech? These reviews suck!