SiS 745 Questions

[Gurm]

Ok, just picked up a SiS 745 motherboard (MSI 745 Ultra, to be exact) and have a few questions.

1. The output from Sandra is pretty funky here. Tells me the SPD information is invalid, and then starts going on about how the memory controller supports FPM. Bizarre!

2. Benchmarks are a bit low. I'm getting 1300mb/sec memory throughput. Ought to be closer to 1800mb/sec.

So - drivers? What do I need? And how do I tweak this (can you tell it's Gurm's first AMD board?).

- Gurm

[Greebe]

...

[Gurm]

Sure sure, rub in the fact that you just answered my question on ICQ.

- Gurm

[Nuno]

So I suppose you don´t need help any more...

[Gurm]

Dunno. Greebe simply suggested that:

1. Sandra doesn't know jack about the SiS 745, despite it being on their compatibility list (not hard to believe).

2. That my processor resetting to 100mhz all the time was due to heatsink misalignment (same thing happened to him until he reseated his sink).

But, if you have any suggestions about drivers or tweaking, latency (mine is set to 64 right now), or whatnot - fire away.

- Gurm

[Nuno]

Ok... I do have a ECS K75SA based on the SiS 735 chipset. 745 is basically the same, only with *official* 133/166 support.

About Sandra, I think Greebe is correct. Despite it´s almost a standard for benchmarking, the information it reports is dependant on correct chipset suport. On not-so-mainstream chipsets it can give very hilarious reports...

Memory performance is roughly identical between 735 and 745. The memory controller was not improved and a asyncronous 133/166 memory bus doesn´t perform that better than a 133/133. About relative performance, the SiS 7x5 is between a AMD 760 and a Via KT266A and nowhere near the KT333. It still performs adequatly, IMHO, and let´s face it, very well for the cost. In Sandra2002 memory tests I get 1810/1734, but that´s with Crucial DDR at 2-2-2 on a 147 fsb, "ultra" setting on BIOS. So at 133 fsb and with more relaxed memory timings it should be performing around 1300~1400 Mb/sec. I don´t know if you´re actually expecting more performance than the chipset actually is able to give.

About the 100 Mhz fsb problem I really don´t know about it...
PCI latency is set to 64 also. From memory, I have FW and SBA enabled, AGP 4X, AGP apert 64 Mb...

About drivers be sure to ONLY use SiS AGP driver. It actually performs good with standard WinXP drivers, but AGP Driver 1.09 improves performance quite a bit and fixes a compatibility issue with ATI Radeon cards. For chipset, usb, IDE and so one use standard winXP drivers. They do a wonderful job at it. Download from http://driver2.sis.com/agp/agp109f.exe but install *only* the AGP driver by updating it from the device manager.

Also go to http://forum.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi , both to ECS and MSI forum. Quite a buch of technical guys out there.

Hope this helps...

[Sasq]

just to show off the speed over here...




Dan

[Greebe]

2001 MB/s and 1865MB/s here... if I up it to 1.696gHz I get 2022/1932

I hear that there is a beta BIOS out for the board (Overclockers forums) ver 1.12 is about and addresses many issues that this MB has(mem dividers not working, etc), but from all that I've tested it does very well without any VIA headaches

[Gurm]

Yes, thanks Nuno.

Greebe, if I don't get to you before you read this on messenger, where is that beta BIOS mentioned?

- Gurm

P.S. Several others also concur that the reason WCPUID calls my chip an Athlon MP is because I lucked out and got an unlocked one. Yay!