BACK IN AUGUST, we reviewed a pair of chipsets from SiS and VIA that represented the first wave of responses to Intel's 865/875 series. We dubbed them "single-barreled shotguns," because neither had a dual-channel memory controller. The Intel chipsets, by contrast, can feed up to 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth over that 800MHz system bus thanks to a pair of DDR400 memory channels. Despite this handicap, the single-barreled shotguns performed well--especially the PT800, whose spunky performance (with one DIMM installed, at least) surprised us. VIA and SiS were coming close to catching Intel.

Now comes the encore. Both VIA and SiS have prepped their dual-channel memory controllers, and both chipsets are now at rough feature parity with Intel. The Intel competition hasn't sat still, however. Last time around, we used Intel's own typically tame motherboards to test the 865PE and 875P chipsets. This time out, we're using Abit's spicy IC7-G, a tricked-out enthusiast's mobo with playing-for-keeps performance. And we've cut out the stock 865PE chipset, because all the decent enthusiast's boards these days have BIOS options that enable internal memory controller timings entirely similar to the 875P's Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT), erasing the most notable distinction between the 865PE and 875P.

To make things even more interesting, we've blindsided our contestants with a series of I/O and south bridge tests, measuring everything from USB 2.0 transfer rates to Ethernet performance and CPU overhead.

Are Taiwan's "twin dragons" finally ready to take on the chipsets Intel launched back in April? Well, only one way to find out...

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