Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra

Zitat

After giving the Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra a thorough run-through, it’s clear to us that this motherboard is all about features and not so much about performance. It’s impossible to ignore the 8S655FX Ultra’s pile of onboard components: high-quality AC’97 audio codec with jack sensing capability, GbE 10/100/1000 controller, dual BIOSes, IDE RAID with ATAPI support, native Serial ATA via the brand new SiS 964 South Bridge, IEEE 1394 FireWire 400, and of course dual DDR400 and 800MHz FSB support via a brand new SiS 655FX North Bridge. Based on these features, the Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra is the most feature-filled Pentium 4 desktop motherboard currently available. Only Gigabyte’s very own 8KNXP is as comparable in sheer feature set.

Amazingly enough, when the 8S655FX Ultra becomes available in the middle of next month, it will retail for an unbelievably low price of $105! You would be hard pressed to find a motherboard that costs $175 with a comparable feature set to the Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra selling at $105. Clearly, SiS is selling SiS 655FX chipsets cheap, very cheap. We hope this kind of pricing continues. Maybe Intel will finally realize that charging an arm and a leg for 875P chipsets may not be the best strategy considering its miniscule performance advantages.