SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

Under Windows 98 we were able to get scores with the 730S running at the 133MHz FSB along with it running at 100MHz, so we add another bar to the graph. 

Quake III Arena is a bit more than your typical 3D first person shooter since its engine happens to be one of the most well written and stressful when it comes to games of its class.  Quake III Arena has always appreciated increased memory bandwidth as well as a high bandwidth FSB.  Taking these characteristics into account the benchmark results make quite a bit of sense considering what we’ve seen thus far about the 730S’ memory performance. 

Clock for clock we see that the 730S is 12% slower than the KT133, and even when running the 730S at the 133MHz DDR FSB setting (effectively 266MHz) it’s still 7% slower than the VIA KT133 clocked at 100MHz DDR. 

At 1024 x 768 x 32 the performance is limited by the memory bandwidth available on the test bed’s GeForce2 GTS accelerator and thus creates a fairly uniform performance distribution.