SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

Starting off at 640 x 480 x 16 the SiS 300 graphics on the 730S is offering approximately half the performance of the TNT2 M64.  At this low of a resolution the TNT2 M64 is benefiting from the fact that it has a much faster on-board frame buffer than the SiS 300 which must go all the way over to the shared system memory in order to swap textures. 

The 730S platform is offering decent performance just about equivalent to that of the i815 with a Celeron 766.  An 800MHz Celeron in this case would be able to give the Duron quite a bit of competition.  This is obviously painting a much more competitive picture than when the Duron is resting nicely on a KT133 platform of its own. 

There are two forces at work here that are holding the Duron back.  We know for a fact that the Duron 800 is considerably faster than the Celeron 766 as was evident from our Celeron 766 Review in which the Duron 700 was able to noticeably outperform the processor.  So why is it that the Celeron 766 is within striking distance of the Duron 800 now?

First, the Quake III performance of all of the platforms here is being limited by the performance of the integrated video solutions.  In this case, going from a Duron 600 to a Duron 800 wouldn’t result in a great performance increase at all.  However, overclocking the memory bus from 133MHz as it is now to 150MHz (if such an overclock were possible without changing any other settings) would result in a much larger performance boost.

The second factor is that, as we proved in the earlier benchmarks, the 730S features a memory controller that is between 10 and 20% slower than the KT133’s PC133 SDRAM controller which is already a few percent slower than the MCH on the i815E. 

As the resolution increases, the memory dependency does as well.  This cuts the TNT2 M64’s performance advantage almost in half since the card only has 8MB of SDRAM on it with a 64-bit memory bus.  In 32-bit color the performance drop would be even more significant to the point where both the 730S and the 815E could surpass the KT133 + TNT2M64 setup.

Again the 730S is just barely faster than the 815 with the slower Celeron 766.