Those of you that were excited about the SiS753’s performance, and were hoping for a tweaker’s board, will probably have to keep looking. The K7S5A is rather sparse in the overclocking department. The board provides a few Front Side Bus speeds, but that’s about it. Available bus speeds are 100, 112, 124, 133, 138, 150 and 166 MHz. In each case, the memory bus is run at the same speed as the system bus, with the exception of the 100 MHz FSB speed, in which case the memory (either SDR or DDR) can be run at either 100 or 133 MHz.


Fig 4. The ITE 8705F hardware monitoring controller.

As yet, the board does not offer any way to manipulate multipliers or voltages. Voltage and fan monitoring is provided by ITE’s 8705F controller, which allows monitoring of the board’s two fan headers, and standard voltages.


Fig 3. ECS has equipped the board with a heatsink, although the SiS735 reference design does not call for cooling of any sort.

Interestingly, the 735 chipset runs quite cool, even when using DDR memory. This was somewhat contrary to our expectations, as given the way AMD and VIA’s Athlon chipsets run, and also the fact that this is essentially a North and Southbridge all in one package, we expected the 735 to run a bit warmer. Nevertheless, the board was equipped with only a heatsink, and SiS’ reference design doesn’t even call for that, which helps to keep the cost of the board low.