Dual Channel seems to be the buzz word. Intel did it with their Granite Bay for the Pentium 4 and nVidia did it with the nForce2 for the Athlon. It’s time for SiS add some marketing and performance punch to their products and they do that by releasing the 655 chipset for the Pentium 4. Unlike the Granite Bay, which only offered DDR266 support, the SiS product offers dual channel DDR333 and DDR400 support as well. Theoretically, it sounds dumb to have anything over DDR266 in dual channel for the Pentium 4 as the CPU in its current form, can only provide 4.2GB/sec which is what Dual DDR266 can provide. However, we’ve seen a lot of theories shot down when it comes to PCs. Lets see what SiS has up its sleeve in our review of the MSI 655 MAX motherboard based on the SiS 655 chipset.
CPU:
Supports 400/533MHz System Data Bus Intel Pentium® 4 Socket478 processor
Chipset:
SiS 655 + SiS 963
Memory:
Four 184-pin DIMM sockets support DDR SDRAM modules. Max 4.0 GB
Audio:
C-Media 9739A with SPDIF support
IDE/SCSI:
Supports Dual Ultra ATA/133, Ultra ATA/100,Ultra ATA/66,Ultra ATA/33 channels supporting 4 devices Promise 20376 controller supporting 2 x SATA devices and 1 ATA 133
I/O Connectors:
2 x PS/2, 2 x Serial, 1 x Parallel, 1 x Media, 6 x USB, 3 x 1394, 1 x RJ-45
