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With the release of Intel’s i875P “Canterwood” and i865PE “Springdale” chipsets earlier this year, Pentium 4 systems were able to be taken to new performance heights, furthering their lead over the Taiwanese chipset manufacturers. At the time of the release, and up until this point, Intel has held the top spot for high performance due to a lack of competitive products coming out of Taiwan. With the legal problems that dragged on between Intel and VIA now out of the way, VIA has come to the market with their own single channel chipset, however they have yet to get their dual channel supporting chipset to the market as of yet. All the while, the only real chipset that was offered with dual channel memory support was SiS’ own 655 chipset, although it suffered from limited FSB and DRAM frequency support. Today, we will be taking a look at SiS’ latest chipset, the 655FX, featuring full support for 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors, dual channel DDR400, native Serial ATA, and more. Before we get to the performance aspects of the SiS655FX chipset, let us first take a glance at some of the advancements and technologies used by it.

..:: SiS 655FX Chipset Specifications ::..

Features	Benefits
CPU supported	Intel Pentium® 4 FSB 800 MHz CPU with Hyper-Threading technology
Dual Channel DDR400/DDR333 support	Support Maximum Memory Bandwidth 6.4GB/s.
MuTIOL 1G® technology	Proprietary Interconnect between SiS655FX and SiS964.SiS MuTIOL® 1G deliver 1GB/s bandwidth.
8X AGP upgrade flexibility	Make system performance upgrade and user's facilitation.Support Maximum AGP interface bandwidth 2.1GB/s.Backwards compatible with AGP 4X.
Integrated SATA Controller with RAID functions.	Provide 2 independent SATA ports, compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 Specification.Support RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.
ATA133 enhancement	Fastest storage support. Increasing data/file transfer rate.
AC97 Controller	Hollywood 3D stereo enriches audio surrounding with up to six channels.
ACR(Advanced Communications Riser) card support	Allow multiple configurations on a single card to extend USB, LAN, HomePNA, modem, and audio for greater flexibility. Compatible to PCI with minimum design changes.
Integrated Communication Controller for LAN or HPNA use	MII interface used for 10/100Mbps LAN or 1/10Mbps HomePNA function. Reaching cost-effective solution and design elasticity.
Integrated USB2.0 Controllers	One controller for 8 ports, achieving real legacy free systems.