Introduction

As the years rolled by in our competitive computer market, we've encountered a number of chipsets. On average, we see a couple new chipsets every quarter. Taking you guys 3-4 years back, we basically had two primary chipset makers: VIA and Intel. As time flew by, one name started appearing more commonplace. This name was SiS and they fought their way trying to make a move on the two dominant chipset makers.

As chipsets kept rolling out for the newly beloved Northwood processors, things began to heat up. Intel released a slew of their i845 DDR chipsets while VIA released the P4X chipset without the proper licenses to manufacture a P4-DDR solution. However controversial, and legal action was indeed taken, it certainly fired up the P4-DDR chipset battle. But to top it off, SiS with their newly release SiS 648 chipset entered the arena to make things slightly more interesting. With features such as AGP 8x and Serial ATA standard, could this be the chipset everyone has been waiting for?

Lately, the boards with the new SiS chipset began to appear on the market. We all look out for the motherboard giants, EPoX, Abit and Asus. After all, these are the boards everyone wants to fit their computers with. Quality, stability and performance are three words that best describe products from these motherboard giants. But is it possible for them to screw up at times? Asus is a long-time player, putting out great, stable boards since as long as I can recall. They released their SiS 648 based board, the P4S8X not too long ago. It seems like an action packed board full of features but can it prove worthy of the Asus brand?

Today, we look at the Asus P4S8X. Will it be another Asus champ... or worse, its first flop?