Background of SiS771

As you may notice, most of the chipset providers didn’t come up with really impressive products which are designed for AMD Socket AM2 platform. For example, NVIDIA only holds C51 and C61 so far, and the latter is just slightly different from the former; VIA doesn’t have any active promotion for its integrated chipsets; ATI seems stop all activities after been merged. SiS, on the other hand, takes all its efforts on developing SiS771 chipset. We’re shocked by the performance of SiS771, especially by its 3D effects. Combining with SiS966 Southbridge chip, SiS771 chipset seems ready to be a super star in the integrated chipset market.

SiS771--Leading integrated chipset for Socket AM2

In the traditional architecture of chipset, memory control unit is integrated with the Northbridge. Therefore, the efficiency of memory controller in Northbridge becomes a key factor in the system performance. However, the situation turned out differently since AMD 64 CPU has been introduced to the public. It integrates memory controller in CPU, which greatly accelerates the data transmission between CPU and memory so that it hugely lifts up the system efficiency.

Following this, the difference between chipsets is getting smaller. The competitive ability falls to the Southbridge, HyperTransport™, and bandwidth between the Northbridge and the Southbridge. As for the integrated chipset, the embedded graphics core would be the key point.

The Southbridge has been apparently one of SiS competitive advantages. MUTIOL® technology, which is the connecting interface between Northbridge and Southbridge, has been performed pretty well. As for embedded graphics core, SiS put on much more efforts than NVDIA and ATI do. We can’t wait to experience the performance of SiS771.

Look deeply at the SiS771: Socket AM2 stimulants

Over the past two years, AMD64 CPU has taken a certain market share. The Socket 754 and the Socket 939 seem gradually drop out from the market by the second half of this year. The Socket AM2 becomes a standard platform. It supports up to DDR2-800 and seems to leave a lot of space for further upgrade. The SiS771 supports 2GHz HyperTransport™ which fulfills the specification of dual core Athlon 64 X2. Actually, the SiS771 Northbridge is able to work with even higher frequency of HyperTransport™. We will explain this to you later in this report.

It is easy to see from this chart that MuTIOL® connects Northbridge and Southbridge, and it offers up to 1.2GB/s of bandwidth, which increases the performance of data transmission a lot.

SiS771/966 HyperStreaming™ Platform

The Southbridge is getting more and more important since it brings multi-functions in one chip with a cost-effective price. The SiS966, paired with the SiS771, is considered an outstanding Southbridge. It supports four SATAII connectors, and also supports RAID0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD. A perfect data storage system requires not only high-speed disk and RAID controller, but also a high connecting bandwidth between Northbridge and Southbridge, which is SiS’s MuTIOL®. On the other hand, the SiS966 even supports 8 USB2.0 ports, and Gigabit Ethernet Mac.

SiS196 PHY

Look Deeply at the SiS771 Reference Board

Although SiS771 reference board doesn’t have aluminum capacitor nor heat pipe, it still looks well-equipped with its strengthened 3-phases CPU core power supply.

SiS771 reference board

The SiS771 reference board adopts power supply connector of 24 pin ATX + 4 pin. Also, the design of four DDR2 DIMM supports up to DDR2-800, and most important of all, Athlon™ 64 x2 CPU can be used thoroughly.

Support 4 dual channel DDR2-800 memory

For further upgrade, the SiS771 reference board has one PCI Express x16 slot for additional add-on card.

PCI Express slot for add-on graphics card

With the strong support of the SiS966 Southbridge, this reference board includes 4 SATAII connectors, two IDE and one floppy connector.

Completed Data Storage Connectors

We didn’t find a bunch of heat sink on the SiS771 reference board, but only a small piece on the Northbridge which is the key component to produce heat.

SiS966 Southbridge

At first, we thought they forgot to install the heat sink on the SiS966 Southbridge. The truth is, the design of the SiS966 is advanced enough to take care of the heat problem. According to the official data, the SiS771 Northbridge adopts 0.13um process, with as low as 3W power consumption; the SiS966 Southbridge adopts 0.15um process, the chip is much cooler than other competitors’.

SiS771, with low power-consumption, only needs a heat sink

The SiS966 supports two PCI Express x1 interfaces so that they won’t occupy the bandwidth of PCI Express x16 of SiS771. Besides, the SiS966 integrates high-definition audio controller and combines ALC883 codec to be able to perform 8-channel audio. Undoubtedly, the SiS966 offers more valuable supports to customers.

8-channel High Definition Audio connector

We found voltage adjustment, HyperTransport frequency multiplier, and CPU clock adjustment in BIOS menu of the reference board. Also, DDR2 memory is able to adjust to different frequency. In HT overclock testing, we didn’t reduce the HT frequency multiplier when adjusting the CPU clock. The overclocking is easily practiced from 200MHz to 250 MHz. Obviously, this chipset is able to work on higher frequency.

AM2 CPU Socket

SiS771 testing result

To ensure the reliability of the system and meet the requirements of mainstream users, we only used AMD Athlon™ 64 3200+ CPU, combining with 512MB x 2 DDR2-800 memory, Hitachi 160GB SATA2 hard disk, NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX VGA, and Windows XP SP2 OS.

Test result shows the performance of the SiS771 chipset is as good as other brands of chipsets on Socket AM2 platforms. The minor difference among different products basically comes from the clock error. The SiS771 performed pretty well during the whole test. We felt extremely satisfied with its storage compatibility. The SiS771 platform is expected to have better performance by the time it is presented to the market, since it will comes with updated BIOS to provide higher compatibility and performance of the system.

1. Winstone 2004 Testing

Content Creation Winstone keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Test applications include Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Premiere 6.0, Macromedia Director 8.5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, Microsoft Windows Media™ Encoder 7.01.00.3055, Netscape 6.2.3, NewTek's LightWave 7.5, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0. Content Creation Winstone 2003 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score. The SiS771 scores outstanding here because of it’s amazing data I/O efficiency and proprietary MuTIOL® Technology.

Business Winstone is an application-based PC benchmark suite that uses business programs like MS Office 2000, FrontPage 2000, Lotus Notes, and Netscape to test overall system performance. This suite of programs are run from a batch script that attempts to accurately emulate a business system load, then supplies a final performance rating. Since the testing of Business Winstone consumes heavily the resource of system storage devices, the significant storage management performance of the SiS771 and SiS966 help it perform superior as expected.

2. BAPCO SYSMARK 2004

SYSmark 2004 contains scientifically designed workloads that represent the range of activities that an office productivity or Internet content creation work may encounter. It requires a 12 GB HDD space for installation, and it may take 3 to 5 hours to finish the test on SYSmark. In addition to extensive validation across multiple platforms, users can be sure of a consistent and reliable performance comparison. The SiS771 works stable during the whole test process, and only produces little heat when testing, whichdemonstrates the low power-consumption feature of the SiS771.

3．Futuremark PCMark 05

PCMark05 is a premium tool for measuring the whole system hardware performance, which can fairly evaluate the multimedia performance of a platform. The SiS771 chipset perform at the same level with other similar chipsets.

4．Super Pi（1M）

SuperPI calculates the number PI to 1 Million digits in this raw number crunching benchmark. The program allows the user to change the number of digits of PI that can be calculated from 16 thousand to 1 million. Our benchmark is set to 1 Million digits and 19 iterations. And the SiS771 platform works stably through the whole testing.

5．3DMark06

Of course, we also include Futuremark 3DMark 2006 as one of our testing benchmark. Although the SiS771 is an integrated chipset with embedded graphics core, it smoothly finish the test with a score of 3402, which is really impressive and competitive at the setting of 1024x768@32bit.

6. DOOM3

It’s well known that the CPU and memory play important roles at the testing with DOOM3, and the chipset also matters here. The well-composed drivers ensures the PCI Express slot and SATA controllers work stably, and that help the SiS771 chipset score neutrally at the testing with DOOM3. The SiS771 scored 103 FPS at the setting of 1024x768@32bit. There shouldn’t be any big difference with any compatibility issue after all.

7．Integrated Graphics Engine Testing

Since the 《Winning Eleven 8/9》and 《SILENT HILL 4》can be smoothly played on the SiS771 platform with Mirage™3 graphics core, other games which require systems with poorer 3D performance can definitely fit in to the SiS771 platform. However, the capability to more high-end game of the SiS771 chipset is what we really concern.

Based on the result of the test, most 3D and online games can be smoothly played on the SiS771 platform, due to the embedded Mirage™3 graphics engine and fully support to DX9.0. Even although the Mirage™3 graphics engine only carries 2 pipelines, the SiS771 still passed all the graphics testing due to its fully support to Pixel Shader 2.0. On the other hand, only very few heat is generated when the system is working, and that also contributes to the stability of the platform, and makes the SiS771 a nice choice for those users of barebone systems or Mini PCs.

Analyse the Mirage™ 3 Graphics Engine

With the embedded Mirage™3 graphics engine, fully support to DirectX9.0, and Pixel Shader 2.0, the SiS771 can successfully pass the test on 3D Mark03, 05, and 06, and, also, it is the first integrated chipset of SiS won the certification of Windows Vista.

Surprisingly, the SiS Mirage™3 graphics engine can smoothly operated in all the 3D games with its fully support to Pixel Shader. The support up to 256MB share memory of SiS Mirage™3 graphics engines; and the support to dual-channel DDR2-800 memory of AMD socket AM2 CPUs both better the video quality and graphics performance. The SiS Mirage™3 graphics engine can process the data I/O with a bandwidth up to 256-bit, and it can work at the frequency up to 250MHz. Furthermore, this brand-new integrated graphics engine support Z-buffer, bump-mapping and normal-mapping, which enable the SiS771 output image with better quality when playing 3D games.

Actually, not only the 3D graphics performance, but also the optimization for the visual image makes the SiS Mirage™ 3 even more attractive. The Static Image Processing technology can greatly improve the image clarity when we watch the static text image. On the other hand, the Motion Adaptive technology also contribute a lot to better image output for gaming usage.

Static/Slow Motion

With De-interlace technology and 3:2 pull-down detection technology of Mirage™ 3, the SiS771 chipset provides the ultimate image quality, which is considered one of the most powerful products nowadays. The SiS771 can reformat the 24FPS video data to 30FPS video data by compensating 6 additional video frames to performs smoothly video playback.

3:2 pull down

Conclusion

With the coming of new platforms from Intel and AMD, and the popularity of the PCI Express and DDR2, the competition of the chipset market will become much keener. By launching the new chipset for AMD socket AM2 platform, SiS771, SiS expects to create more influence on the OEM market. The SiS771 chipset, with excellent stability and comprehensive compatibility, will definitely receive more applause and grab more market share.