Evaluating the platform

Obviously if we simply benchmarked the 730S in the same manner that we have done all of our other Athlon chipset reviews, it wouldn’t be too useful of a comparison.  Realistically speaking, no one is going to purchase a 730S-based system with a 1.2GHz Athlon and 256MB of SDRAM.  However, without doing a comparison with the fastest processor and a decent amount of memory, we can’t fairly evaluate the 730S as a chipset alone without introducing potential bottlenecks created by using a slower CPU and/or less memory.  So we ran two sets of benchmarks designed to evaluate the SiS 730S as: 1) a chipset and 2) as a platform solution for the Duron processor.

The first set of benchmarks follow our usual chipset review format: they pit the 730S against the KT133 and the ALi MAGiK1 chipsets to show any strengths/weaknesses of the chipset itself.  In these tests we use the external AGP 4X slot to house our test bench GeForce2 GTS in order to eliminate any sort of bottlenecks that may be caused by the chipset’s integrated video.

The second set of benchmarks is designed to place the 730S in the type of system configuration you can reasonably expect to see it used in.  We make use of a Duron 800, 128MB PC133 SDRAM as well as its integrated SiS 300 video core instead of our own GeForce2 GTS.  In this section, the system is compared to an identically configured system using the KT133 chipset and a NVIDIA RivaTNT2 M64 video card (which is commonly found in the lower priced Athlon/Duron systems) as well as a Celeron 766 system using an i810E motherboard. 

So if you’re interested in seeing the chipset compared to other Athlon chipsets, take a look at the first set of benchmarks, otherwise skip ahead to the second set. 

The Chipset Test

Windows 98SE / 2000 Test System

Hardware

CPU(s)

Intel Pentium III 1GHz

AMD Thunderbird 1GHz

Motherboard(s) ASUS CUSL2 ASUS A7V / AMD 760 Reference Board
SiS 730S Reference Board
Memory

256MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM (Micron -7E CAS2)
256MB PC2100 Micron DDR SDRAM (CAS 2.5)

Hard Drive

IBM Deskstar 30GB 75GXP 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/100

CDROM

Phillips 48X

Video Card(s)

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR (default clock - 200/166 DDR)

Ethernet

Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter

Software

Operating System

Windows 98 SE
Windows 2000 Professional SP1

Video Drivers

NVIDIA Detonator3 v6.31 @ 1024 x 768 x 16 @ 75Hz
NVIDIA Detonator3 v6.31 @ 1280 x 1024 x 32 (SPECviewperf) @ 75Hz
VIA 4-in-1 4.24A was used for all VIA based boards

Benchmarking Applications

Gaming

Unreal Tournament 4.32 Reverend's Thunder.dem
Quake III Arena v1.16n demo001.dm3
MDK2 Timedemo
Expendable Timedemo

Productivity

BAPCo SYSMark 2000
Ziff Davis Business Winstone 2001
Ziff Davis Content Creation Winstone 2001
SPECviewperf 6.1.2

Getting your very own bus Business/Content Creation Performance - Win2K
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