Availability: Q2-Q3 2000

Web: www.sis.com.tw

Until today, there were two choices in Athlon chipsets, AMD's 750 and VIA's KX133. The field has now changed. SiS has given us 350 pages of information on their SiS 730S chipset, an integrated northbridge/southbridge/video chipset for the AMD Athlon and Duron CPUs. Herein you will find the important details on the first first real competitor to VIA in the Athlon chipset market.

Built on a .18 micron process, the 730S is a modern chipset in every way. It supports both Slot A and Socket A AMD CPUs through a 200MHz FSB, which gives motherboard manufacturers a bit more flexibility in design than with VIA's upcoming Socket A only KT133. The 730S supports up to 3GB of PC133 memory in three slots and six memory banks, up to 512MB of which also acts as video memory for the integrated video.

Speaking of video, the chipset does support 32-bit 3D color, FSAA, 2048x2048 textures, and the other basic 3D features, though with no hardware transformation and lighting (just don't expect GeForce-like performance obviously). Like Intel's 810 chipset, the 730S sports built-in 2D and 3D video. Unlike the 810, the 730S has an AGP 4x slot, and also supports fast writes. The integrated vdieo is disabled when an AGP card is installed. However, if a motherboard maker uses SiS' 301 video chip in concert with the 730S, both the internal video and the 301 can be used in concert, providing a normal CRT out through the integrated video as well as either a 2nd CRT out, a DFP out, or a TV-out through the 301. Not too shabby.