VIA and SiS Battle for Supremacy: 3-way P4 DDR Motherboard Roundup

Final Words

As proven by our benchmark results, DDR400 doesn’t exactly add a lot of extra performance to the Pentium 4 platform, in addition to not being fully operational with any of the motherboards we used (the SiS 648 Reference board is the exception). Again, this can probably be attributed to the fact that JEDEC has yet to approve an official specification for this memory type and lower latency DDR400 chips are not prevalent enough. The lack of a memory spec makes validation more than just a trivial matter (although validating memory compatibility has never been trivial). Therefore, because there is no spec for DDR400 memory at the moment, we shouldn’t really expect to see current motherboards working well with “fake” DDR400 memory.

If you’ve been keeping up on your news lately, you’ve probably read that VIA, SiS, and NVIDIA are all planning on cooperating with Samsung on attaining a steady flow of DDR400 supplies. At this early stage, it’s clear that these chipset companies will be all over real DDR400 if JEDEC grants approval for the spec. Chipset vendors will fully support DDR400 memory if it does get finalized, and with that we’re sure to see better compatibility and some noticeable performance gains on the Pentium 4 platform.

In the end, all of us can expect to see companies like VIA and SiS continuously battling it out for the performance crown in an increasing cutthroat industry. And to that we say good luck and Godspeed.