MSI 655 Max (SiS 655)

After thoroughly benchmarking and stress testing the MSI 655 Max we have come to several conclusions:

First off, we can safely say that MSI's 655 Max motherboard is the fastest Pentium 4 motherboard we've ever tested, albeit by a relatively slim margin over Rambus solutions based on Intel's 850E chipset. While E7205 boards were more or less the performance equivalent of PC1066 Rambus equipped systems, MSI's 655 Max has clearly taken the performance lead, but again only by a very thin margin.

Motherboards based on SiS' 655 chipset will be marginally faster than E7205, 850E, and 845PE motherboards as long as dual channel DDR400 support is fully implemented in SiS 655 motherboards (MSI's board is just one example). We never would have thought it, but dual channel DDR400 actually outperforms dual channel DDR266, despite the fact that the Pentium 4's FSB doesn't require more than 4.2GB/s of peak bandwidth, which is exactly what dual channel DDR266 is capable of offering.

With Serial ATA RAID, FireWire, Gigabit LAN and 6-channel sound all packed into the MSI 655 Max, the expected selling price of $165 seems like an absolute steal. This is in part made possible by SiS' low chipset selling price; we've been quoted as low as $38 for SiS 655 chipsets. Compare that to the $55 or so for E7205 chipsets and you can see there's quite a significant difference. You won't have to wait long either; by the end of February MSI expects to ship the 655 Max (FISR version) en masse. 2-3-03 UPDATE MSI does not setup an MSRP for customers, so we've corrected the error to reflect "selling price" instead.

We hope you enjoyed our coverage of MSI's 655 Max. Stay tuned as we will be testing Hyper Threading and 800MHz FSB support SiS 655 boards have to offer in an upcoming review...