SiS 655....what to believe?

[Wyerd]

Up till Friday, MSI's 655 MAX was a winning solution for my new gaming pc, based off these articles from Anandtech;
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1781
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1784
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1786

Then I read THG's review on the same boards;
http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/20030312/index.html

I'm a little confused now....
AT claims their tests were performed with XMS3200 (pc400).
THG claims they couldn't even get these mobos to work with pc400 amongst other weird problems.
AT makes these new SiS chipsets look like the current heavyweight champions for P4.
THG makes it sound like these chipsets are still in their infancy stage, and can't stand up to 2 y/o chip technology.

I'm saying one is right and the other is wrong, but why the considerable differences? Does anyone have good/bad experiences with these mobos they can share?

 

[melvin13]

well its mixed. There have been people that have reported no problems with this chipset. I did run into some problems with it, however it turned out to be a flaky BIOS chip on my particular board. Also there have been a few people reporting some instability with corsair memory. Someone had relpied to one of my earlier posts, with some different ram timings to see if that helps. But I'm still waiting as I filled an RMA request to get a new board. At worst case I will just buy different ram and sell off my corsair on ebay or something. but corsair ram looks so 'perty' with the platnium heat sheilds 😉

 

[LumberJack]

You selling corair??.. what type / speed?

Oh yeah.. on the issue of those boards. The chipset is new.. and all computer stuff that's new is buggy. AT might say it's looking like the heavyweight but it's too early to see that. E7205 been around for a while and it's rock solid... Tom is not jumping to conclusions as quickly as those guys at AT...

To err is human... to really screw things up you need a computer!

 

[stable]

We didn't have the problems reported here on Tom's when testing the new SiS 655's. Furthermore, we have had fewer problems running Corsair Low Latency RAM than with anything else so I'm kind of caught off gaurd in that respect. Typically the Corsair low latency XMS blows away anything else we use in testing, so I'm not sure what to tell you beyond, "try it and see".

In our testing, the SiS 655's and Nforce2's run better with Corsair RAM than anything else.

Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'

 

[Crashman]

Actually they didn't say PC3200 wouldn't work, they said PC3200 wouldn't underclock to PC2700 speed on the Gigabyte board! They absolutely refused to run the stuff at PC3200 speed because...maybe because they wanted someone else to win?

Apparently the chipset has trouble running at Cas2. Anandtec mentioned that also. PC3200 at Cas2.5 beat everything, even other boards at Cas2, in their test. My guess is that Cas2 might be working improperly due to overly agressive timings.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[melvin13]

Well I have 2x 256 CMX256A-3200LLPT. But not to sure I if I am indeed going to sell it. I want to get my RMA'ed board and try the new cas timings and give it a go. If its to much hasle then I will sell them but if its this simple timing fix then I'll keep em....

I paid 91 US for them. So since there are like 2 weeks old I'd probably sell'em for 80 or so.