SOYO Dragon Ultra Mainboard Review

SOYO Dragon Ultra - SIS 645 Mainboard
Manufactured by: SOYO
Price: $155
Reviewed by:
Date : February 22nd 2002

The SiS 645/961 Chipset

(We apologize for over simplification in this article as we are tryin to cater to our members of the audience who are not so technically inclined and familiar as most of you may be)

Since the SiS 645 Chipset is a relative new platform for the Intel Pentium 4 Processor it is fair that we do an analysis of the chipset before we move on to the Motherboard itself.

The SiS 645 is what some people called the best thing that ever happened to the Pentium 4 and guess what unlike the solution by VIA the SiS 645 is Perfectly legal full endorsed by the big brother Intel himself!!!!.

Though we talk about this chipset as the SiS 645 which is actually what used to be the northbridge of the controller chipsets it is a combination of the SiS 645 chipset which is equivalent to the Conventional northbridge and the SiS 961 which is equivalent to the conventional southbridge which makes up SiS's solution.

Now though these two chips are roughly equivalent to the North and South Bridges that we have got so used to seeing in large numbers of motherboards there is a distinct difference between what SiS is offering and the old 2 Bridge Architecture. In the old Architecture where there was a Northbridge which handled I/O Operations pertaining to the AGP Graphics Accelerator and the Main Memory and the SouthBridge handled all I/O Operations pertaining to all other Devices like PCI/ISA Cards Onboard Sound etc: Now these two bridges were bridged by the PCI Bus in the conventional solutions which served to be a bottle neck limiting performance as it limited that rate of data transfer between the two bridges. So all motherboard chipset manufacturers identified this problem and came up with their own solutions to the problem, which was more or less a dedicated path for data transfer between the 2 bridges. This was first highlighted in the hub architecture bought forward by the Intel 815. Now all motherboard chipsets follow some variant of the same technology.

This picture taken straight off SiS's website illustrates what I have been talking about. The 645 Chipset and the 961 chipset the Northbridge and the Southbridge are connected by a dedicated Multidirectional Data bus offering a peak bandwith of 533MB/Sec for data transfer between the two chips which the PCI Bridge conntects directly to the SiS 961 chipset.

Apart from this the SiS 961 Chipset also features integrated AC 97 Compliant Audio Capable of producing Dolby 51 Compliant Digital 6 Channel Stereo sound.
It also features integrated Network options, Integraded Universal Serial Bus Controller which can handle upto 6 USB ports in all. It also includes a V.90 HSP Compliant Modem and so many other options. I am having problems figuring out what they left out. Maybe a IEE1384 FireWire Support would have spiced it up even more. The SiS option is Extremely attractive to the general buyer because of the number of integrated options available with the SiS chipset.

Talking about the Northbridge of the combination the SiS 645 Chipset It has support for DDR 333 SD Ram. This is feature that will certainly be appreciated by consumers who are thinking about investment protection. Though DDR 333 is not very popular right now due to high price it will be in a few months when performance conscious consumers will opt for the higher memory bandwidth offered by which is around 2.7GB/S against the 2.2GB/S Memory bandwith offered by current DRR266 SD Ram and the 1.3GB/S offered by PC133 SD Ram.

And by the way the SiS 654 includes support for SD Ram as well though we probably won't see any solutions featuring SD Ram.

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