SiS 746 Chipset question.

[Fenrir(AVA)]

Any idea of street dates for any AGP8x board? Emailed MSI and ASUS regarding the SiS 746 and no response from either. Any ideas?

[Gurm]

Who cares?

AGP 8x is a gimmick.

Gimme a "G"!
Gimme an "I"!
Gimme a...

You get the idea. It's a gimmick. Absolutely useless. Buy a 745.

- Gurm

[Fenrir(AVA)]

Want a future proof mobo kind of redundent yes I know. Just want the mobo to have AGP 8x built in Lan and the SiS 746 gives that, so any one else got a comment?

[Wombat]

Yeah. Who cares about AGP 8x? It's a gimmick. G-I-M...

I'd rather NOT have built-in LAN. It's kind of hard to re-assign the IRQ sharing.

[Fenrir(AVA)]

The system I am want this for is going to be hooked up to my TV and I want to build it and just use it but not have to upgrade it with in ayear or so.

[Wombat]

So who cares about AGP 8x?

[GT98]

Originally posted by Wombat

I'd rather NOT have built-in LAN. It's kind of hard to re-assign the IRQ sharing.

Well if your running a Windows 2000/XP system, IRQ problems are a thing of the past with them and a more upto date motherboard...I forget what the feature is called ATM, but you can have IRQs ranging from 1 all the way up 20

[Wombat]

Well if your running a Windows 2000/XP system, IRQ problems are a thing of the past with them and a more upto date motherboard...I forget what the feature is called ATM, but you can have IRQs ranging from 1 all the way up 20

Not quite. You're still limited to 4 interrupt pins.

[Marshmallowman]

sis 746 also has USB 2 and ata133...agp 8x could not hurt either

[Fenrir(AVA)]

Plus fire wire, cant hurt either.

[Gurm]

745 can have firewire and built-in LAN, just depends on which board you buy, and with which options.

USB 2.0 hasn't been proven to work on the 746 any better than it works on any other implementation - which is to say not at all.

And AGP 8x won't "future proof" the board, it will in fact just be useless. *ahrm*

Now, all that said - if you want USB2 and ATA133 (both useless at this time, but perhaps useful in the future) then by all means wait, but don't wait for AGP8x. In fact, AGP2x and AGP4x are useless, too.

- Gurm

[103er-Fan]

Originally posted by Fenrir(AVA)
Plus fire wire, cant hurt either.

You can get 2 Firewire ports on SiS745 chipsets, at least MSI is offering a variant which has two ports included.
Otherwise of course the USB 2.0 is nice.... but is it a real must have? Not at the moment.... the same with AGP 8.0 first we need cards which support AGP 8.0 (ok, there are some on the hoirzont) and then I doubt that the performance boost will be large, there isn't even a large difference between 2x and 4x, so I doubt we will see many differences from 4x to 8x.
About the date I would say around August, usually it takes about one month after production start till the first boards hit the stores

[Drizzt]

And there are 256 IRQs on the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiipssssssssssssss........

But we still have to deal with 640kbiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttssssss.....

And Bill Gates does beneficence to Africaaaaaaaaaaaaa.......
(gifting copy of Windows XPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP)

And I have to deal with 20 irqsssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
While NVidia build a new GPU with 2 trillion transitooooooooorrrrrrrrrrs and twelve CPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

That don't work's because there are not fre IRQSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS


(no, I'm not crazy, I simply find amusing that I had more IRQs on my old Z80 board than now on a ipadupa MB)
(and that my processor is engineered on a 1970's project)
(and that windows is a 32 bit OS working on a 16 bit Kernel relying on an 8 bit disk operating system engineered for a 4 bit processor)

(uhmmm...maybe too much chatting with dogbert, i'm becoming a little sick...)

[Gurm]

Drizzt - it's called "backwards compatibility". They tried not to do it, but people bitched too damn loud when their 8-year-old hardware/software failed to work.

- Gurm

[Fenrir(AVA)]

nForce2 looks promising, but man that mobo is overkill! nVidia stick to video cards...and just make them better. Please!!!!!!