Introduction

Lately, SiS has been in a haste of updating some of their chipsets following the ‘FX’ nomenclature. This stretches the chipset lineup as each stepping signifies only small changes, with the majority of its features remaining similar in the new FX variant. Improvements were made to the existing chipset model and only the 'FX' suffix were later appended to the model number to signify its slight updated feature. A prime example was that of the SiS 746 and the SiS 746FX.

The predecessor of the SiS 746 was a single chip SiS 745 solution that contained the functionality of both the North and Southbridge chipsets. We believe the single chip solution proved to be difficult for scalability and flexibility. For these reasons, Socket-A CPU chipsets since SiS 746 and henceforth utilized the traditional North and Southbridge chipset pairs. The SiS 746 brought with it ATA-133 and AGP-8x support, but it was still limited to FSB266 CPUs and supported a maximum memory speed of DDR333, similar to that of the SiS 745. The SiS 746FX upped this specification to FSB333 CPU and DDR400 memory support. We have already seen how the latter platform performs with the SiS 746FX reference motherboard and the Iwill K7S2 motherboards that we reviewed sometime back.

ECS is well known for very cost-effective solutions such as their SiS 735 / 745 based motherboards in the past and it was only natural of them to continue this tradition. The L7S7A motherboard is ECS' incarnation of the SiS 746 and we shall soon see how it fared against our previously tested SiS 746FX platforms. Along with the motherboard came only the manual, drivers CD and IDE/Floppy cables typical of any other ECS motherboard bundles.