Sis 645 chipset question

[bill1971]

Thinking about a Soyo mobo which uses the Sis 645DX chipset.

I'm not sold on Sis yet. Benchmarks as far as speed, seem to be very good. But the only info I could find here doing a search,(dunbar will be so proud of me - lol), said that the chipset was
stable, but the drivers were "buggy."

I'd appreciate any input from folks who have had experience with
this particular Sis 645 chipset. Thanks.

- Bill

[Etruscan]

SiS, as a company, is a bit funny about drivers bill1971. I believe it stems from the fact that SiS is probably the most used chipset by OEMs. They, therefore, are not real in tune with the retail user market. The OEMs know which drivers have to be installed, and how they have to be installed to make the board work in the OS. It seems to be almost something of a trade secret - you know the kind of thing I'm talkin about?

I have found with the SiS boards I've been using for the last year that - in spite of some rough edges in the installation and programming areas - the drivers work all right and are complete. Some of the retail installation programs on the install CD are incomplete or if used improperly will cause improper driver installaion, in some cases. Most, if not all, problems can be avoided by manual installation of drivers. The video drivers that were included for the onboard video had a utility program for refresh rates and gamma correction. The program seemed to be incomplete and inoperable in the form it was included to the retail buyer. The video drivers themselves work fine and are extremely compatable with very wide range of programs - more than any other video drivers I've seen to date.

It is little things like when you install the AGP drivers it causes a fault in windows and produces an error. The AGP drivers install, however, in spite of the error, on reboot and work fine. I have given a few examples of my experience with SiS drivers in the last year, to give you an idea. I've never used the the drivers for SiS 645DX. I would not let my concerns over drivers stop me from purchasing another SiS board retail and putting it together myself. The price, speed, and reliabilty of the SiS chipsets more than make up for the driver deficencies - which mostly stem from retail install programs. In short, don't let rumours about buggy drivers stop you from buying. They ain't real user friendly, but I'm sure they work. From what I've read the SiS 645DX is very fast, and when it first hit the market was the fastest as well as most economical.