SiS 756: PCI Express for AMD Socket 939

Final Words

The SiS 756 competes very well in performance benchmarks at stock speeds. We found little in our Benchmark tests that would sway us for or against the SiS 756 chipset. However, when we look at the broader picture of features, the SiS 756 is clearly on the short end of the stick.

Not only will you not find Firewire or SATA2 or SLI on the SiS756, you will also find overclocking performance among the worst that we have yet measured on a Socket 939 board. That won't matter to you if you never overclock and never intend to, but it will matter to many Athlon 64 buyers who consider themselves to be enthusiasts.

SiS did have the foresight to include Gigabit LAN in their chipset, something ULi overlooked in their M1695/M1587 chipset. It is also good news that the SiS chipset Gigabit LAN is more than just a checklist add-on. Performance of the PCIe based Gigabit LAN is as good as we have measured, though the CPU overhead is a bit higher than what we like to see.

Audio on the older 965L south bridge is the below average AC'97 seen on the nForce4 chipset. This is clearly not up to the new audio performance leaders in the AMD world - ATI and ULi with their high performance Azalia audio. Fortunately, manufacturers can correct this very soon by combining the 956 south bridge with a 756 to deliver High Definition Azalia audio to SiS 756 customers. This leaves NVIDIA, the AMD chipset leader, in an embarrassing position. After pioneering top-notch on-board audio with their nForce2 chipset, they will soon be the only Athlon 64 chipset maker without High Definition audio.

The SiS 756 is competitive in performance and moderate on features. Future plans for additional south bridges show that SiS has plans in the works to bring even more features to this chipset with new south bridge choices. Having said this, we wonder why it is next to impossible to find the SiS 756 chipset on retail motherboards almost 6 months after Reference Boards shipped. SiS, through either their Marketing efforts or their actual performance on contracts, appears to be failing to capture the confidence of board makers. With competitive chipset performance, someone in SiS needs to be asking questions and finding answers as to why so few manufacturers will build new boards with a SiS chipset. Unless SiS finds these answers soon, they may find themselves pushed out of the chipset market by aggressive new players.