It might not have an option to control Vsync. But at least it doesn't tease you with one like the Nvidia 128ZX. (The driver option doesn't work and the Nvidia 128ZX doesn't support openGL extension for triple/double buffered vsync).
Nathan if you like that Sis 315 era hope you can review S3 era during VIA take over (their Delta Chrome and Chrome 500 series)Quite interesting History
This video is very interesting to me. Intel Arc released last year finally, and the closest 'analogue' to it was SiS. When launching a new videocard line, Both Intel and SiS were massive companies whom had years of experience developing GPUs... but despite SiS having far more experience under the self branded and then Xabre cards; the ill repute IQ followed the Volari Duo... bombed and was considering a failure down to the uArch level... Yet the A770/750 have a respected uArch and rapidly improving driver wise even over a half a year later. Welcome back, hope life goes well!
What is the "IQ"? Also, what was XGI thinking when they went for the Volari Duo? "Hey guys, designing a Direct3D 9.0-compatible chip is already hard enough, so let's make ours multi-GPU too!" If XGI had stuck to single-GPU solutions, they wouldn't have been judged as harshly and would've saved all the money they wasted on multi-GPU development. But it makes for an interesting footnote: Only 3 companies (Nvidia, ATI, and XGI) have ever released Direct3D 9.0-compatible multi-GPU-capable chips.
2:01 Except for the SiS 735 chipset found on the legendary K7S5A which offered much better value than any competing mainboard at the time could offer. Admittedly, this is the lone example of SiS releasing such a well received product that I can think of, and I’ve been deep in the PC world since 1996.
The newer SiS 746 was also pretty good, giving super budget AMD motherboards with good performance and stability. I mean a new AsRock K7S8X was 40€ in 2003 and had everything you needed.
SiS actually made chipset for highend products. Their chipsets was frequently used in the early 90's in server and workstation motherboards with Eisa slots
Good to know! If anyone wants to know more about SiS chipsets (especially older ones) there's definitely better videos out there for that. My take is really only going to give you the graphics side of things.
SiS also made a quad channel RDRAM chipset for Pentium 4, the SiS R659. Unfortunately I don't think it reached any production boards. There's some mention of an Asus P4S13G with the chipset but I can't find any evidence that it got released.
A few years ago I lucked into a free 1999 Gateway tower on Craigslist. From the model number it was a Pentium III and I could barely see a gold PCB in the AGP slot. Was hoping to get a RIVA TNT or maybe even TNT2... NOPE! SIS 305 16mb. I still haven't played with that card haha
Long time no see, still love the "old world" content. SIS didnt make terrible chipsets, some of theyre budget offerings werent terrible, and they were a fairly common videochips for some blade servers (if i remeber right) and were a fairly common players in the Mobile PC video chipset space. in the late-90s, early 2000s.
Ooooh, I had one of these. One stand alone, integrated on the SiS740 chipset for my Athlon XP. I remember liking the performance a lot, never let me down for the things I wanted to play. I also remember it performing and looking better that the integrated GeForce 2 my cousin had, which surprised my when I noticed.
I used to have a SiS 6326 and it was a good choice among low-cost cards. The 3D visual quality was "less broken" :) Later, whem people around me started to switching to cheap laptops, SiS 630/650 was definitely a good choice compared to other IGPs with shared memory.
I think I had a SiS card for all of 3 days once. Wouldn't even run all the rendering features of Q3A-engine'd Jedi Knight 2, and returned it to Fry's. (guessing it was an 'E' w/o T&L) Needless to say, it was a quick lesson in 'paying attention to specs'
I own one of these but it doesn't have DVI out from what I can tell. Also it has a bigger PCB. About games, I didn't notice any problems with Unreal and Quake in that. NFS V is perfect as well. To be honest I was kinda shocked how well it worked
Lot of kind drivers you can find on CDs to MB with SiS chipset ... for example. Many times these low cost brands just did one uni CD for all their stuff (GPU, MB, controllers). Its good to search year by year for more versions.
This was awesome, and just when I was starting to jones for some pixel pipes too! I worked for a school back in the early 2000s and they were all about matrox dualhead cards.. I'd love to see some old matrox coverage!
In ~2008 the "SiS 315 Pro" has been used for the onboard video in the Chinese "home-grown" MIPS architecture mini PC called Lemote Fuloong 2F. There have never been any 3D-capable drivers for MIPS or GNU/Linux in general, so it was not possible to use any 3D acceleration on that PC. Leaving everyone puzzled why they chose to integrate that chip to begin with.
This was my first agp card when i was young and dumb , i went to a pc shop back in the day , i knew about gforce but the shop seller there literally made me buy this , saying its much better then anything, i didn't know much back then , because tbh i had a lot of problems with it , but it did got me to play games like serious sam , quake 3 arena and so on.
As an hardcore videocard collector... I like this. Those cards (SiS, Trident, PowerVR, etc) might not be the best, they are mediocre (at best), but they are also quite rare, compared to Nvidia, ATI or 3dfx. And I love them, that era was awesome.
I remember SiS graphics, certainly not fondly. I had an Acer laptop with Mirage 2 graphics (M760GX) and it couldn't even run CS 1.6 at 640x480 with over 30fps, UT99 was good-ish at that resolution. It's a miracle they got the Mirage 3 certified for Windows Aero in Vista, as even the GMA950 could barely do that with a beta driver.
I lived with SiS integrated graphics (661FX chipset) for a few years in the early 2000's. Not great, but I didn't do a lot of 3D gaming at the time anyway. C&C games, flash games, and Runescape were playable, and that was good enough for me. Attempts at 3D gaming, like HL2 and CS were...unfruitful. Literally sub-10FPS.
I bought the 32mb 315e off tiger direct back in middle school, 2002 or so. Sadly my only agp socket 7 could only go up to 400mhz on my k6-2. (66x6)but it was still an upgrade in performance over the other with the sis530 chipset. Handled project 64 emulator just fine. I also had the 6326 8mb... It was... A thing lol. Later ended up with a agp board that supported my k6-2 at 550,but not the sis. So stuck in an i740 lol
i remember the first 'new' hardware i bought, it was a mobo with SiS6326 8MB built in, and a Cyrix MII 300 (225MHz i think) it was amazing compared to the quite old used junk i had before, i was actually able to play Startrek: Starfleet Academy, and StarTrek: Borg ran with 16bit color :D
Not gonna lie, the ending was quite funny "WTF" moment. On paper, performance comperablt to Geforce 2 MX in late 2000/early 2001 looks quite impressive, but then you have to remember that MX 2000 is using 64 bit SDR memory interface, so SiS 315 bearly competes wih Geforce 2 MX butchered beyond belief.
I actually like SiS products as a whole. Their big success was SDRAM/DDR controllers which were industry leading in performance, and overall the SIS chipsets were... largely not particularly buggy. And i thought SiS6326 was somewhat promising, like, i have seen worse efforts from other companies. The chipset-integrated 300-series graphics, i might have one of those. It's an 8" size mini-laptop built by ASUStek and branded in different regions either as ASUS or as JVC. Being a single chip north bridge, south bridge and graphics with 3D/Video capabilities, 3 large chips rolled into one, the whole board could be made that much smaller, enabling this product class to begin with. A uniquely good platform family for MID/UMPC, which didn't have to be powerful, just competent, power-frugal and take up little board space. Maybe they were a little ahead of time on that even? Love the power backfeed, cute engineering oversight :D
I have a 315E lying about and... that one has SDR. Worst of both worlds. XD Ain't used it for anything, but along with a 6326 I like having 'em for simply being non ATi/AMD or Nvidia graphics cards. Got a cheapy Matrox and S3 card as well.
SIS, my first experience of using a computer for the first time. i miss my one compaq system that was my first computer, the SIS GPU was fast enough to run need for speed porsche unleashed at 800x600 if i remember. it was one of those best buy bundles that we got somewhere between 97/98. that ending bit was funny, must be voltage back feeding from the HDMI.
The first computer I ever had was a second hand Pentium 2 350. It came with a Sis 300 something, 305 or 315, something like that. I played the shit out of ePSXe with it back in the day.
I don't agree with the chipsets not being considered "high tier". That may be true from the socket 7 and on, but the previous ones (386 and specially 486) were top notch.
i used to have a combo SiS305/315 that I used for years on an old 98/2k box. It worked perfectly but started getting errors and failed after many many years of use
Very nice! Finally a 315 from SiS on your channel. It may be slow but these kinds of alternatives are always interesting historical pieces.😁 These cards have texture filtering issues. Similar to what you showed, texture blockiness can be noticed in Quake III in particular.
Well TBF most of the integrated guys from that time other than Realtek died out, I mean when was the last time you saw a Via or Crystal chip? Back in the day you saw those all the time, but once the CPUs started getting more and more features integrated they just went away.
Amazing video, Nathan! Please, dont stop! You are really great on doing such videos! I have memories from SiS and you have nailed it on your observations! Thanks!!!
Can't wait to see your take on the SiS Xabre with a multitude of graphic options, including a basic skeleton framework that "allowed" you to see through walls in First person shooters. It had everything but performance.
I remember during late 90s, almost all budget PC came with SIS 6326/TNT2 M64(vanta)/SIS 305. I had one SIS 305 also and the thing is just works, no fan needed, OC all the way to the max and it just take it like a champ.
My Dad had a SiS 6326 8MB PCI graphics adapter. It was in a K6-2 380 Mhz, 64MB PC-100 Ram, 6.4GB Seagate HDD IDE, a 16x CD-ROM IDE, and a 33.6Kbps USRobotics ISA Modem. He later upgraded it to a 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 16MB graphics card. I had a Rendition Verite V2200 8MB AGP in my PC back then. He had a SiS Xabre 400 video card as well that was a real disappointment.
Funny enough the two cards you might have considered the most disappointing are the most valuable now. The Vérité V2200 and Xabre 400 are pretty collectible, and I find the Vérité cards in particular to be interesting. Super looking forward to doing a video on those some day
Great video! I miss my Kyro 2 64MB which was an AGP 2.0 (2X) card and not compatible with nForce chipsets AGP 3.0 (4X-8X) , I learned that the hard way... It was with VIA ones KV800 I think for AMD 64 cpus and probably SIS chipsets. I say you should dig at VIA - S3 products next, I also had an S3 Savage 4 card 32MB AGP 4X which had half the power of Kyro II but was interesting as a card.
Sounds like the old story of AIBs dropping the ball. Worth noting SISs chipsets are actually pretty good. They tended to be very highly integrated, to the point of having a single chip solution that supports both DDR and SDR for the Athlon XP. Intel's Hub architecture that integrated damn near everything onto the Northbridge (excuse me, "MCH")? Yeah, SIS beat them to it bay a few years.
They did make some pretty good chipsets. Even their budget stuff tends to work well, it's just not as good. They are pretty much always rock-solid stable, unlike VIA. They just kind of stopped making them though. I think the point was more that they produced largely budget stuff though. There are certainly some exceptions though, and some of those Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chipsets were on-par with or exceeded performance of the mainline, high-end consumer Intel chipsets. (Almost never with enthusiast tweaking features though)
Not complete junk and has 32 bit colour makes it slightly more attractive than some older 16 bit only cards like i740, RIVA128 or ATI Rage. Strange texture mag filtering might be worth investigating with other driver versions. If UT was in opengl mode it might be an opengl driver bug.
First of all, allow me to say *Welcome back!* It's good to see you again 🎉 Second, that _feature_ at the end sure feels like something that was an edge case nobody at the FCC tested for, bexause that was weird. 😅 Third, I have to admit it's a funky looking card. But it does explain _why_ this card was slept on. Even so, _if_ you had an Xabre or Volari Duo on hand , i would be most curuous how well it did challenge its contemporaries.
Looks very similar to my SiS 315E, the Apollo 3D Thrill 315E. Difference between that and my SiS card ends up being the svideo out, and the ECS 315 still having all 4 TMU+the T&L engine. Bungie didn't lie about Halo not being supported on the 315. The results are spectacularly broken, unlike on the SiS 630 chipset.
@@PixelPipes Could be specific to the card or system. I was running mine in the Duron 1000 PC that I got from my uncle (stand in for its dead MX400 until a better example was affordable), albeit under Windows XP, because that is what the PC had been used with and some games just don't work well under 98SE (eg. Dragon Riders Chronicles of Pern broken under 98SE with all of my Nvidia cards and drivers, fine under XP).
@@PixelPipes More than likely - I would not call Halo playable on the dedicated 315 however - years of fun on my first desktop with its iGPU, the weirdest output I've ever seen on the card (the 315e also has the same display errors, and then locks up). At the same time, Quake 1 was unplayable for me due to how the screen misbehaved with either card, and it was a chore to get the cards working under XP as I had to get the SiS drivers installed first before using the card, as the default resolution set by XP resulted in a black screen.
Not entirily correct. there was one exception to the rule, the mighty sis 735 chipset , which was comparable and sometimes even better than chipsets from AMD , VIA etc. it was very fast and featureful for its time, and it even was a single-chip solution that ran cool and it was cheap. A noticable board that came out with this was the ECS K7S5A , that board had many issues, but none were the fault of the chipset on it . but yeah, all other stuff is quite mediocre indeed.
Woah, so glad to see a new video from you! Really love your channel! BTW, I have the Elitegroup card that you showed, advertising AGP 4X. Despite what the box says, it is in fact a 315E card. When I go to the AGP Information page in the driver, it does show that the card supports 4X. Perhaps the 315E added 4X support?
Nathan! So glad to see you back. I get so many compliments from my follow nerds about my Card & Drivers T-Shirt! Will be wearing it at VCF West at my exhibit booth about computer generations next weekend. Also power back feeding off AGP?!?!?! What is this madness!???
Nice!! You're the first person I heard from that bought that shirt! Glad you like it! It's probably my favorite. Have fun at the event! Wish I could be there
..i still hang on to my agp hd2400xt ............ ....... still looking out for that old system with an agp port..... i almost lucked out but found out its a jive ass intel pentium 4 system..its mother board has its agp port neutered off of it and redirected to..an intel... gma graphics potatochip.. BUT it DOES have a regular Pci slot which gives my pci pny fx5200 256mb card life again.. fx5200's poo but hey its got 256mbs of ramses on it
I know you always put your cards into otherwise overpowered systems for the time but I would have loved to see how the benchmarks ran stacked up using something like a Celeron 733 or K6III 500 which is what most budget people would have actually been using in late 2001.
Omg hahaha my original first PC had an SiS Chipset forgot if it is from the 300 or 315 Pentium 3 or 4 CPU if I could remember Had dial-up as well here in the Philippines back then, mostly playing DOS and very early 3D PC games. I had alot of Empire Earth gameplays back then After that PC went kaput, I went handheld consoles High school when I had my next upgrade to a Core 2 Duo with an old GT card, then upgraded to a 650Ti Then went to laptops, i5 4th gen and GTX 850M, now Ryzen 7 6800H and RTX 3050M
Love the video. I have a 315E in PCI and with a C2D and SB Live in Win98SE can run MaxPayne, RetCastleWolf, Mafia, NFS, etc in 1024x768. T&L is key. It isnt the fastest by far, but very compatible and slow enough to make me nostalgic. 👽💾🤗
I have a friend that had his parents choose their PC parts and ended up with stuff like this, from Pine or what not. I really like seeing how these budget and not well know video cards perform now that we can objectively see how bad they are, or not 😂 I'm glad you're back, thanks for this one, it was fun!
never bought any graphics cards at all in 2001... i was downloading Mp3s and using Napster then and just got a 100mg Iomega zip drive on my Celeron 433.. i had the 8meg AGP sis 620 motherboard graphics and i could play UT2000 just fine in software render and it looked great. Why waste money on a graphics card, it didnt help that i had the cheapest motherboard money could buy a Abit board with just 1 PCI expansion slot and everything else built in.
I had a SiS based graphics card. It used the SiS 6326 chipset under the Diamond Speedstar A50 brand. Lots of fond memories actually. Initially bought it as an interim solution after I junked my ATI Rage IIc card, but found that I liked it enough as a 2D only card, I kept until I finally replaced it with a Creative Labs TnT2 Ultra. I already had a 12mb Voodoo2 SLI servicing my gaming needs. Not the best desktop card at the time, but it was significantly cheaper than the Matrox cards I wanted at the time. Also, using the Voodoo2 pass through, I doubt I could have taken advantage of the Matrox image quality to the extent I could have without the Voodoo2 pass through cable.
Can remember buying a PC back in the 90s and was on a budget, so I opted for one with an SIS chipset and ohhhh boy it was bad. Struggled with most games, even on super low resolutions. Even tried a dedicated graphics card in it and it refused to work 😋
SiS did launch some good chipsets for motherboards once in a blue moon: SiS 735 for socket A and SiS 645 and updated versions of it for Pentium 4... nothing notable in video cards sector. Xabre was a notorious flop as well, labelled a gf4 mx killer in Q3 and that's about it.
Minor correction on the Radeon VE specs @ 10:40
The memory is 32MB DDR 64-bit
That is all. Carry on.
It might not have an option to control Vsync.
But at least it doesn't tease you with one like the Nvidia 128ZX.
(The driver option doesn't work and the Nvidia 128ZX doesn't support openGL extension for triple/double buffered vsync).
@@niewazneniewazne1890 true
Nathan if you like that Sis 315 era hope you can review S3 era during VIA take over (their Delta Chrome and Chrome 500 series)Quite interesting History
Welcome back! 😊🎉
wow 1st comment
Yes! Thanks! :D
Welcome back! We missed GPU June this year. I just picked up a 3870x2 myself.
I have one of those in my closet, what are you going to use it for?
Really glad to see a new PixelPipes video, really happy to see you’re back
This video is very interesting to me. Intel Arc released last year finally, and the closest 'analogue' to it was SiS. When launching a new videocard line, Both Intel and SiS were massive companies whom had years of experience developing GPUs... but despite SiS having far more experience under the self branded and then Xabre cards; the ill repute IQ followed the Volari Duo... bombed and was considering a failure down to the uArch level... Yet the A770/750 have a respected uArch and rapidly improving driver wise even over a half a year later. Welcome back, hope life goes well!
What is the "IQ"? Also, what was XGI thinking when they went for the Volari Duo? "Hey guys, designing a Direct3D 9.0-compatible chip is already hard enough, so let's make ours multi-GPU too!" If XGI had stuck to single-GPU solutions, they wouldn't have been judged as harshly and would've saved all the money they wasted on multi-GPU development. But it makes for an interesting footnote: Only 3 companies (Nvidia, ATI, and XGI) have ever released Direct3D 9.0-compatible multi-GPU-capable chips.
2:01 Except for the SiS 735 chipset found on the legendary K7S5A which offered much better value than any competing mainboard at the time could offer.
Admittedly, this is the lone example of SiS releasing such a well received product that I can think of, and I’ve been deep in the PC world since 1996.
The newer SiS 746 was also pretty good, giving super budget AMD motherboards with good performance and stability. I mean a new AsRock K7S8X was 40€ in 2003 and had everything you needed.
@@Raptor3388 👌🏻
The SiS chipsets for the 486 were some of the best available.
SiS also makes the best universal AGP chipset for P4s, the 645DX
I had a SiS 735 board. It was a very good chipset at that time indeed, and very affordable. I liked SiS, in general, but never had a GPU from them.
YOU'RE BACK! Missed you man!
Yeah, it's definitely been a long while
SiS actually made chipset for highend products. Their chipsets was frequently used in the early 90's in server and workstation motherboards with Eisa slots
Good to know! If anyone wants to know more about SiS chipsets (especially older ones) there's definitely better videos out there for that. My take is really only going to give you the graphics side of things.
Yes! Also their 486 chipsets were one of the best in stability and performance alongside UMCs!
SiS also made a quad channel RDRAM chipset for Pentium 4, the SiS R659. Unfortunately I don't think it reached any production boards. There's some mention of an Asus P4S13G with the chipset but I can't find any evidence that it got released.
A few years ago I lucked into a free 1999 Gateway tower on Craigslist. From the model number it was a Pentium III and I could barely see a gold PCB in the AGP slot. Was hoping to get a RIVA TNT or maybe even TNT2...
NOPE! SIS 305 16mb. I still haven't played with that card haha
where in the world were you, I missed your cool gpu reviews
Thank you so much for covering this card!
Never high-end? There was the SiS 648 chipset, that beat intel to DDR400 and AGP 8x support for the Pentium4 CPU's ...
Long time no see, still love the "old world" content.
SIS didnt make terrible chipsets, some of theyre budget offerings werent terrible, and they were a fairly common videochips for some blade servers (if i remeber right) and were a fairly common players in the Mobile PC video chipset space. in the late-90s, early 2000s.
Ooooh, I had one of these.
One stand alone, integrated on the SiS740 chipset for my Athlon XP.
I remember liking the performance a lot, never let me down for the things I wanted to play.
I also remember it performing and looking better that the integrated GeForce 2 my cousin had, which surprised my when I noticed.
Great to see another video! Some GPU suggestions: Sis Xabre, XGi Volari, S3 Deltachrome...
I used to have a SiS 6326 and it was a good choice among low-cost cards. The 3D visual quality was "less broken" :) Later, whem people around me started to switching to cheap laptops, SiS 630/650 was definitely a good choice compared to other IGPs with shared memory.
I think I had a SiS card for all of 3 days once. Wouldn't even run all the rendering features of Q3A-engine'd Jedi Knight 2, and returned it to Fry's. (guessing it was an 'E' w/o T&L) Needless to say, it was a quick lesson in 'paying attention to specs'
I own one of these but it doesn't have DVI out from what I can tell. Also it has a bigger PCB. About games, I didn't notice any problems with Unreal and Quake in that. NFS V is perfect as well. To be honest I was kinda shocked how well it worked
Lot of kind drivers you can find on CDs to MB with SiS chipset ... for example. Many times these low cost brands just did one uni CD for all their stuff (GPU, MB, controllers). Its good to search year by year for more versions.
That's exactly what's on the disc. I actually filmed a segment looking through the files on the disc but I felt it was too long/boring so I cut it
Woah! Thought your channel was dead. Glad you're back.
This was awesome, and just when I was starting to jones for some pixel pipes too!
I worked for a school back in the early 2000s and they were all about matrox dualhead cards.. I'd love to see some old matrox coverage!
SiS xabre 400.. worst purchase ever. i was quite noob in 2002. I still have the card too, wonder if it still works.
Believe it or not the 400 is pretty uncommon now. Hang onto it!
@@PixelPipes For better or worse, I’m a parts hoarder. 😂 definitely going to test it soon.
In ~2008 the "SiS 315 Pro" has been used for the onboard video in the Chinese "home-grown" MIPS architecture mini PC called Lemote Fuloong 2F. There have never been any 3D-capable drivers for MIPS or GNU/Linux in general, so it was not possible to use any 3D acceleration on that PC. Leaving everyone puzzled why they chose to integrate that chip to begin with.
Wow that's interesting
Forgot I was subscribed to Jack Black's tech channel 😂 Love the beard, keep up the great content!
This was my first agp card when i was young and dumb , i went to a pc shop back in the day , i knew about gforce but the shop seller there literally made me buy this , saying its much better then anything, i didn't know much back then , because tbh i had a lot of problems with it , but it did got me to play games like serious sam , quake 3 arena and so on.
I have a Low Profile 315 SIS card myself and from someone who dismounts pcs that go to trash let me tell you that they are pretty common
Great to see another review! While I can't say I'm impressed by the performance here part of me was still expecting much worse 😅
Another great video which brought back memories of gaming in the early 2000s. Such a choice of cards back then...
As an hardcore videocard collector... I like this. Those cards (SiS, Trident, PowerVR, etc) might not be the best, they are mediocre (at best), but they are also quite rare, compared to Nvidia, ATI or 3dfx. And I love them, that era was awesome.
Heck yeah!, a new pixel pipe video and its on interesting card.
I remember SiS graphics, certainly not fondly. I had an Acer laptop with Mirage 2 graphics (M760GX) and it couldn't even run CS 1.6 at 640x480 with over 30fps, UT99 was good-ish at that resolution. It's a miracle they got the Mirage 3 certified for Windows Aero in Vista, as even the GMA950 could barely do that with a beta driver.
I lived with SiS integrated graphics (661FX chipset) for a few years in the early 2000's. Not great, but I didn't do a lot of 3D gaming at the time anyway. C&C games, flash games, and Runescape were playable, and that was good enough for me. Attempts at 3D gaming, like HL2 and CS were...unfruitful. Literally sub-10FPS.
I bought the 32mb 315e off tiger direct back in middle school, 2002 or so. Sadly my only agp socket 7 could only go up to 400mhz on my k6-2.
(66x6)but it was still an upgrade in performance over the other with the sis530 chipset. Handled project 64 emulator just fine. I also had the 6326 8mb... It was... A thing lol. Later ended up with a agp board that supported my k6-2 at 550,but not the sis. So stuck in an i740 lol
i remember the first 'new' hardware i bought, it was a mobo with SiS6326 8MB built in, and a Cyrix MII 300 (225MHz i think) it was amazing compared to the quite old used junk i had before, i was actually able to play Startrek: Starfleet Academy, and StarTrek: Borg ran with 16bit color :D
sweeeeet pixle pipes its been a while
I am glad to see you back. Thanks for the video.
Not gonna lie, the ending was quite funny "WTF" moment.
On paper, performance comperablt to Geforce 2 MX in late 2000/early 2001 looks quite impressive, but then you have to remember that MX 2000 is using 64 bit SDR memory interface, so SiS 315 bearly competes wih Geforce 2 MX butchered beyond belief.
I actually like SiS products as a whole. Their big success was SDRAM/DDR controllers which were industry leading in performance, and overall the SIS chipsets were... largely not particularly buggy. And i thought SiS6326 was somewhat promising, like, i have seen worse efforts from other companies.
The chipset-integrated 300-series graphics, i might have one of those. It's an 8" size mini-laptop built by ASUStek and branded in different regions either as ASUS or as JVC. Being a single chip north bridge, south bridge and graphics with 3D/Video capabilities, 3 large chips rolled into one, the whole board could be made that much smaller, enabling this product class to begin with. A uniquely good platform family for MID/UMPC, which didn't have to be powerful, just competent, power-frugal and take up little board space. Maybe they were a little ahead of time on that even?
Love the power backfeed, cute engineering oversight :D
I have a 315E lying about and... that one has SDR. Worst of both worlds. XD
Ain't used it for anything, but along with a 6326 I like having 'em for simply being non ATi/AMD or Nvidia graphics cards. Got a cheapy Matrox and S3 card as well.
We want to se a review of "XGI volari v8 duo". :-p
Being a poor bastard... I DO remember SiS fondly! 6326, 530, and the mighty 730 (SiS 300) that I've used well into 2012 (too poor to even get a 741 😀)
SIS, my first experience of using a computer for the first time.
i miss my one compaq system that was my first computer, the SIS GPU was fast enough to run need for speed porsche unleashed at 800x600 if i remember.
it was one of those best buy bundles that we got somewhere between 97/98.
that ending bit was funny, must be voltage back feeding from the HDMI.
I got an SiS 6326 to play Diablo... 1
As a child I thought to upgrade my 3dfx voodoo 1 4MB for a 8MB SIS 6326. I luckly brought it back the same day. It was super bad! 😂
The first computer I ever had was a second hand Pentium 2 350. It came with a Sis 300 something, 305 or 315, something like that. I played the shit out of ePSXe with it back in the day.
You're back! yay! Love your videos.
Also love your shirt, fantastic. Rockin some classic vaporwave
I don't agree with the chipsets not being considered "high tier". That may be true from the socket 7 and on, but the previous ones (386 and specially 486) were top notch.
i used to have a combo SiS305/315 that I used for years on an old 98/2k box. It worked perfectly but started getting errors and failed after many many years of use
Very nice! Finally a 315 from SiS on your channel. It may be slow but these kinds of alternatives are always interesting historical pieces.😁 These cards have texture filtering issues. Similar to what you showed, texture blockiness can be noticed in Quake III in particular.
SIS review.... HOW??....there are no drivers, or they are all broken..... omg he's got a disk.
Well TBF most of the integrated guys from that time other than Realtek died out, I mean when was the last time you saw a Via or Crystal chip? Back in the day you saw those all the time, but once the CPUs started getting more and more features integrated they just went away.
Amazing video, Nathan! Please, dont stop! You are really great on doing such videos! I have memories from SiS and you have nailed it on your observations! Thanks!!!
I miss the competition in GPUs
Ooooh the look of shame from someone who abandoned us for almost 8 months xD
hope to see a s3 chromium gpu surface some day.. thats not intigratd.
(guess what)
Heeey, welcome back! Fantastic video as always, and a fascinating look at card I sure wasn't aware of. It's... almost decent!
Can't wait to see your take on the SiS Xabre with a multitude of graphic options, including a basic skeleton framework that "allowed" you to see through walls in First person shooters. It had everything but performance.
Oh wow yeah that sounds interesting!
At one time my Dad had a Xabre 400 64MB what a disappointment.
Great edit/direction, which made a boring card a fun to watch from start to end of the video.
Radeon VE, bad memory. I never forget ATI for that :)
SiS chipsets weren't the best performers but after selling hundreds of systems with SiS chipsets, they never gave any problems either...
Id love to see your take on the xgi Volari. I had one back in the early 2000s but i dont remember much about it.
Eventually!
I remember during late 90s, almost all budget PC came with SIS 6326/TNT2 M64(vanta)/SIS 305. I had one SIS 305 also and the thing is just works, no fan needed, OC all the way to the max and it just take it like a champ.
Wow, you know the card is terrible when even Kyro performs better.
Never count out the Kyro!
SiS did ok enough with the 2d cards, but they never got "the point" of 3d cards and it only got worse as they integrated them into their chipsets
My Dad had a SiS 6326 8MB PCI graphics adapter. It was in a K6-2 380 Mhz, 64MB PC-100 Ram, 6.4GB Seagate HDD IDE, a 16x CD-ROM IDE, and a 33.6Kbps USRobotics ISA Modem. He later upgraded it to a 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 16MB graphics card. I had a Rendition Verite V2200 8MB AGP in my PC back then. He had a SiS Xabre 400 video card as well that was a real disappointment.
Funny enough the two cards you might have considered the most disappointing are the most valuable now. The Vérité V2200 and Xabre 400 are pretty collectible, and I find the Vérité cards in particular to be interesting. Super looking forward to doing a video on those some day
128MB? That`s privilege 😆
Awesome review.
Great video! I miss my Kyro 2 64MB which was an AGP 2.0 (2X) card and not compatible with nForce chipsets AGP 3.0 (4X-8X) , I learned that the hard way... It was with VIA ones KV800 I think for AMD 64 cpus and probably SIS chipsets.
I say you should dig at VIA - S3 products next, I also had an S3 Savage 4 card 32MB AGP 4X which had half the power of Kyro II but was interesting as a card.
I want to but Rik's Random Retro did an excellent video on the Savage 4 recently, so I'll probably choose something else next
SiS 315 performs better than expected, but still not great
Woohoo PixelPipes is back!
Welcome back PixelPipes!!!!!!!
Sounds like the old story of AIBs dropping the ball. Worth noting SISs chipsets are actually pretty good. They tended to be very highly integrated, to the point of having a single chip solution that supports both DDR and SDR for the Athlon XP. Intel's Hub architecture that integrated damn near everything onto the Northbridge (excuse me, "MCH")? Yeah, SIS beat them to it bay a few years.
They did make some pretty good chipsets. Even their budget stuff tends to work well, it's just not as good. They are pretty much always rock-solid stable, unlike VIA. They just kind of stopped making them though. I think the point was more that they produced largely budget stuff though. There are certainly some exceptions though, and some of those Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chipsets were on-par with or exceeded performance of the mainline, high-end consumer Intel chipsets. (Almost never with enthusiast tweaking features though)
Not complete junk and has 32 bit colour makes it slightly more attractive than some older 16 bit only cards like i740, RIVA128 or ATI Rage. Strange texture mag filtering might be worth investigating with other driver versions. If UT was in opengl mode it might be an opengl driver bug.
I thought about trying older drivers but it was taking too long as it is. Supposedly the latest ones are the best anyway. UT was running in D3D mode.
Loved seeing an Apollo card on there--I had an Apollo-branded Voodoo 2...
Awesome video Nathan. Keep up the good work!
First of all, allow me to say *Welcome back!* It's good to see you again 🎉
Second, that _feature_ at the end sure feels like something that was an edge case nobody at the FCC tested for, bexause that was weird. 😅
Third, I have to admit it's a funky looking card. But it does explain _why_ this card was slept on. Even so, _if_ you had an Xabre or Volari Duo on hand , i would be most curuous how well it did challenge its contemporaries.
Volari Duo would be a dream come true to cover. I do have a Volari V3XT, and Xabre 200 though
Looks very similar to my SiS 315E, the Apollo 3D Thrill 315E. Difference between that and my SiS card ends up being the svideo out, and the ECS 315 still having all 4 TMU+the T&L engine. Bungie didn't lie about Halo not being supported on the 315. The results are spectacularly broken, unlike on the SiS 630 chipset.
I couldn't even get Halo to launch.
@@PixelPipes Could be specific to the card or system. I was running mine in the Duron 1000 PC that I got from my uncle (stand in for its dead MX400 until a better example was affordable), albeit under Windows XP, because that is what the PC had been used with and some games just don't work well under 98SE (eg. Dragon Riders Chronicles of Pern broken under 98SE with all of my Nvidia cards and drivers, fine under XP).
Ohh I wonder if the game is more forgiving under XP then
@@PixelPipes More than likely - I would not call Halo playable on the dedicated 315 however - years of fun on my first desktop with its iGPU, the weirdest output I've ever seen on the card (the 315e also has the same display errors, and then locks up).
At the same time, Quake 1 was unplayable for me due to how the screen misbehaved with either card, and it was a chore to get the cards working under XP as I had to get the SiS drivers installed first before using the card, as the default resolution set by XP resulted in a black screen.
Not entirily correct. there was one exception to the rule, the mighty sis 735 chipset , which was comparable and sometimes even better than chipsets from AMD , VIA etc. it was very fast and featureful for its time, and it even was a single-chip solution that ran cool and it was cheap. A noticable board that came out with this was the ECS K7S5A , that board had many issues, but none were the fault of the chipset on it . but yeah, all other stuff is quite mediocre indeed.
Yeah I have a board with the later 745 chipset that I was using for a while, but it was never as fast as my KT333 boards.
Woah, so glad to see a new video from you! Really love your channel! BTW, I have the Elitegroup card that you showed, advertising AGP 4X. Despite what the box says, it is in fact a 315E card. When I go to the AGP Information page in the driver, it does show that the card supports 4X. Perhaps the 315E added 4X support?
So this video was just another excuse to enjoy a bit of Kyro? Welcome back, we missed you!
Any excuse will do!
Glad to see you back. Thanks for the Video
Oh man I remember you posting that video at the end to Twitter!
Yey! A new video :)
Nathan! So glad to see you back. I get so many compliments from my follow nerds about my Card & Drivers T-Shirt! Will be wearing it at VCF West at my exhibit booth about computer generations next weekend. Also power back feeding off AGP?!?!?! What is this madness!???
Nice!! You're the first person I heard from that bought that shirt! Glad you like it! It's probably my favorite. Have fun at the event! Wish I could be there
@@PixelPipes Rock on man! Thanks so much for the reply. Wish you could be here too! Cheers.
PixelPipes' triumphant return! And what an odd card, too! Love it!
Very informative! I love this time period.
Great to see you back with a new video.
..i still hang on to my agp hd2400xt ............ ....... still looking out for that old system with an agp port..... i almost lucked out but found out its a jive ass intel pentium 4 system..its mother board has its agp port neutered off of it and redirected to..an intel... gma graphics potatochip.. BUT it DOES have a regular Pci slot which gives my pci pny fx5200 256mb card life again.. fx5200's poo but hey its got 256mbs of ramses on it
Pleased to see new content from you :-)
I know you always put your cards into otherwise overpowered systems for the time but I would have loved to see how the benchmarks ran stacked up using something like a Celeron 733 or K6III 500 which is what most budget people would have actually been using in late 2001.
Omg hahaha my original first PC had an SiS Chipset forgot if it is from the 300 or 315
Pentium 3 or 4 CPU if I could remember
Had dial-up as well here in the Philippines back then, mostly playing DOS and very early 3D PC games.
I had alot of Empire Earth gameplays back then
After that PC went kaput, I went handheld consoles
High school when I had my next upgrade to a Core 2 Duo with an old GT card, then upgraded to a 650Ti
Then went to laptops, i5 4th gen and GTX 850M, now Ryzen 7 6800H and RTX 3050M
welcome back.
Love the video. I have a 315E in PCI and with a C2D and SB Live in Win98SE can run MaxPayne, RetCastleWolf, Mafia, NFS, etc in 1024x768. T&L is key. It isnt the fastest by far, but very compatible and slow enough to make me nostalgic. 👽💾🤗
I have a friend that had his parents choose their PC parts and ended up with stuff like this, from Pine or what not. I really like seeing how these budget and not well know video cards perform now that we can objectively see how bad they are, or not 😂 I'm glad you're back, thanks for this one, it was fun!
never bought any graphics cards at all in 2001... i was downloading Mp3s and using Napster then and just got a 100mg Iomega zip drive on my Celeron 433.. i had the 8meg AGP sis 620 motherboard graphics and i could play UT2000 just fine in software render and it looked great. Why waste money on a graphics card, it didnt help that i had the cheapest motherboard money could buy a Abit board with just 1 PCI expansion slot and everything else built in.
Remember when SiS made x86 CPUs and Graphics cards....sort of like AMD and recently Intel but it didn't work out for them
got one some time ago. I had no idea what it was.
I had a SiS based graphics card. It used the SiS 6326 chipset under the Diamond Speedstar A50 brand. Lots of fond memories actually. Initially bought it as an interim solution after I junked my ATI Rage IIc card, but found that I liked it enough as a 2D only card, I kept until I finally replaced it with a Creative Labs TnT2 Ultra. I already had a 12mb Voodoo2 SLI servicing my gaming needs. Not the best desktop card at the time, but it was significantly cheaper than the Matrox cards I wanted at the time. Also, using the Voodoo2 pass through, I doubt I could have taken advantage of the Matrox image quality to the extent I could have without the Voodoo2 pass through cable.
Can remember buying a PC back in the 90s and was on a budget, so I opted for one with an SIS chipset and ohhhh boy it was bad. Struggled with most games, even on super low resolutions. Even tried a dedicated graphics card in it and it refused to work 😋
I recall that installing the chipset vendor's GART driver allowed for AGP4x operation. I do not recalling it making a huge difference.
SiS did launch some good chipsets for motherboards once in a blue moon: SiS 735 for socket A and SiS 645 and updated versions of it for Pentium 4... nothing notable in video cards sector. Xabre was a notorious flop as well, labelled a gf4 mx killer in Q3 and that's about it.
Hahaha, the SiS 315 seems to have "selective bilinear filtering" to gain "some performance" on games and benchmarks