SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

At the start of this article we mentioned that the 730S is positioned perfectly to achieve the maximum theoretical bandwidth out of its ATA/100 controller because of the dedicated 133MB/s pathway from the Northbridge to the IDE channels.  The perfect way to test this is to use a benchmark that can test burst read performance where you are more likely to reach the limitations of the controller. 

We used the same IBM 75GXP Ultra ATA/100 hard drive for all of these tests.  Out of the five compared chipsets only the KT133 doesn’t officially support ATA/100 (we tested using the 686A Southbridge which is ATA/66 only).  We already know why the AMD 760 and the MAGiK1 are stuck at a 60MB/s, it seems as if Microsoft has not properly implemented ATA/100 support under Windows 2000, a problem which will be fixed with the upcoming Service Pack 2 release for the OS.  Surprisingly enough, Intel’s storage drivers do implement and enable ATA/100 properly as the i815E is able to surpass the ATA/66 limitations and come ahead with a 76MB/s burst speed.

Even more interesting is the fact that the 730S is only able to come forth with 47.4MB/s in this test.  We hope that this is due to poorly implemented Windows 2000 drivers; While this won’t hurt performance today (no IDE drive is capable of sustaining transfers at more than 40MB/s) it will hinder performance of the drives of tomorrow which will be even faster and even more likely to burst at above 66MB/s.