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Introduction and Specs

For the gamer and serious computer user, when it came time to pick an AMD platform they have reached for the Socket 939. While that socket platform is great at providing better performance, AMD’s Socket 754 is a more logical choice for a budget platform since the CPUs and motherboards are a bit cheaper.

Today we are looking at three such mainboards using the SiS760GX from ECS, Foxconn, and AOpen. While these boards have no real “enthusiast� features to speak of, they are very affordable and have some nice features like the micro ATX form-factor and onboard SiS Mirage 2 video.

For you hardcore gamers, modders, and power users, I encourage you to continue reading as I think the board size and the performance will give you some interesting ideas for a new budget system.

SiS760GX Primer

For those of you unfamiliar with the SiS760GX chipset, it is an AMD chipset supporting:

• HyperTransport bus up to 1600MT/s
• SiS Mirage2 integrated graphics (DirectX 8.1 compliant, 32/64/128MB shared memory)
• AGP 8x
• dual ATA133 IDE channels
• dual SATA 1.0 in RAID 0, 1, JBOD
• AC’97 v2.3
• 10/100 MB LAN

There’s nothing here too radical in this feature line-up with the exception of the Mirage 2 graphics, and the dual ATA133 channels. While the integrated graphics will not turn heads amoung the enthusiasts, it is an interesting cost-cutting feature for general and casual users, and businesses. We will evaluate the performance of this feature later in this article.

While VIA, NVIDIA, and Intel have all gone the route with a single channel, SiS holds onto the dual-channel to help support many customers with older legacy drives (like yours truly). For anyone looking to keep using their old drives and reduce upgrade costs, this is a very welcome feature.

 

Specifications

	AOpen s760GXm-S	ECS 760GX-M	Foxconn 760GXK8MB-ERS
Memory	DDR 333MHz, 400MHz
Memory Slots	DDR - 2 slots
Memory Capacity	DDR - 2GB
Drive Connectivity	4x IDE 2x SATA RAID (RAID 0,1, JBOD)
Video	SiS Mirage 2 Graphics
Audio	Realtek ALC655 (AC'97)	Realtek ALC658 (AC'97)	Realtek ALC655(AC'97)
Analog Audio Connectivity	Speaker-out, Line-in, Microphone (Jack Sensing)
Digital Audio Connectivity	None
Network	Realtek RTL8100C (10/100MB)	Realtek RTL8100C (10/100MB)	Realtek RTL820128L (10/100MB)
USB 2.0	- 4x on rear I/O - 4x spare on two onboard headers	- 4x on rear I/O - 4x spare on two onboard headers	- 4x on rear I/O - 4x spare on two onboard headers - includes 2-port USB bracket
Firewire IEEE1394	None	None	- 1x IEEE1394a on rear I/O - 1x IEEE1394 onboard header

Next Page - AOpen s760GXm-S Features & Bundle

Review Index:
- Select - Summary Introduction and Specs AOpen s760GXm-S Features & Bundle AOpen s760GXm-S BIOS & Layout ECS 760GX-M Features & Bundle ECS 760GX-M BIOS & Layout Foxconn 760GXK8MB Features & Bundle Foxconn 760GXK8MB BIOS & Layout Test System Setup Synthetic - SiSoft Sandra, Everest Application - PCMark04, Winstone, Maya 6 PLE Computational - SuperPi, DVD to DiVX Synthetic Gaming - 3DMark, Aquamark OpenGL Gaming - Doom3, Warhammer 40K DirectX 9 Gaming - Half-Life 2, NFS:Underground 2 Mirage 2 Graphics & Conclusions