VIA and SiS Battle for Supremacy: 3-way P4 DDR Motherboard Roundup

The Candidates

Today we will be looking at a total of 3 different retail motherboards based on the SiS 648 and VIA P4X400 chipsets. These boards include the following:

1. VPSD P4PB 400 (VIA P4X400)
2. Shuttle AS45GTR (SiS 648)
3. Soltek 85ERV-L (VIA P4X400)

During our tests, we discovered that all 3 retail boards were unable to reliably operate using Twinmos DDR400 memory. No matter how conservative we set the memory timings, none of the boards were able to operate DDR400 without crashing consistently. Therefore, we saw no point in listing the few benchmarks these boards were able to complete with DDR400 memory. It’s interesting to note that the SiS 648 reference board running DDR400 memory at stock speeds and timings was perfectly rock solid during all the benchmarks we performed on it. We experienced zero crashes, random reboots or anything else of the sort. Yet, Shuttle’s SiS 648 board was no where near as reliable with DDR400 as the 648 reference board was. We’ll be talking this over with motherboard makers very soon.

On another note, we should mention that the VPSD P4PB 400 has a much more interesting brother coming along soon, going by the name of VPSD P4PB Ultra. The P4PB Ultra comes with quite an extensive feature set; this includes onboard ATA133 Promise RAID (0+1 arrays), support for up to 10 USB 2.0 ports, onboard sound in the form of C-media's 6-channel 8738 chip, and 10/100 Ethernet in the form of VIA’s Rhine III VT6105 chip. Additionally, the P4PB Ultra has a total of 6 PCI slots and 3 DIMM slots.