Availability: Q4 2000 or Q1 2001

Price: Roughly $70 to $90
for an SiS630S-based MB
(Depending on manufacturer and model)

For quite a while, SiS has been the leader in Socket 7 chipsets. Few brand new Socket 7 motherboards sell with anything but a SiS chipset. Seeing as such low-cost systems have sold in large volumes, SiS has managed to move several million chipsets per year. However, while SiS has been dominant in the low-end of x86 chipsets, they have been absent from the mid and high-end. SiS is now moving on up. They have brought their own fabrication plant up to speed and are now entering production with their new Pentium III FC-PGA compatible chipset, the SiS630S.

The SiS630S chipset packs the northbridge, with PC133 memory support, the southbridge, with ATA/100, Ethernet, audio and more, as well as SiS300 video, all into one chip. It obsoletes the "set" from "chipset." It is a fully modern chipset supporting PGA and FC-PGA processors, which includes Intel's Celeron and Pentium III as well as VIA's Cyrix III. SiS was gracious enough to lend us an early reference board for testing, and from our hands-on experience, we bring you this preview today.