Gigabyte SINXP1394 (SiS655) Motherboard Review

Conclusion

Gigabyte has pulled together lately a string of great motherboards for the overclocking segment, and the SINXP1394 adds to their success. Layout of the board is almost exceptional apart from the placement of the 4-pin power connector. Color coding of the DIMM sockets for identification between the two channels is a masterpiece.

The onboard peripherals are tried and true. Silicon Image is the best Serial ATA controller on the market, simply because it isn't a Parallel to Serial solution. The ITE GigaRAID solution is the first we have seen of this chip, but our tests shows it to be on par with the Promise controller in terms of performance, but setup takes a bit extra compared to the rest of the controllers on the market.

The use of the onboard Firewire shows that Gigabyte isn't going cheap on the supplied features that come with the chipset itself. The Firewire controller provided no incompatibilities and was detected in Windows XP without any hassles and without any performance degrading.

Overclocking, while limited by some voltage limitations, was still a very good affair. We managed to run a FSB of 163MHz FSB and a max memory speed of 392MHz. Without the addition of memory voltage settings we weren't able to run the memory above 400MHz.

- Pros

Fast

Stable

Dual DDR support

Hyper Threading support

Firewire

Dual RAID

6-Phase Power

- Cons

Placement of the 4-pin connector

Limited memory and AGP voltage selections

Rating - 9/10 and TweakTown's Editors Choice Award