Chipset Guide

by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 1997 9:36 PM EST
The market demanded for competitors to Intel's TX chipset, and until recently the only answer to those demands was VIA's VP2 chipset.   However, Silicon Integrated Systems, commonly known as SiS, released a successor to their popular 5571 chipset, the SiS 5597 chipset and a variant of it, the SiS 5598.  Those two single chip solutions are versatile enough to be used in virtually any form factor (LPX, NLX, AT, ATX) in a motherboard.   Although very little is known about the 5597/98 series, some of the features of the chipset include:

  • onboard VGA

  • UltraDMA support

  • SDRAM support

  • ACPI support

SiS 5591 Chipset
Common Name SiS 5591
Chipset Packaging Number of chips 1
Packaging Type 1 x 480-pin BGA
CPU Support Number of CPUs 1
AMD CPUs Supported K5, K6
Cyrix CPUs Supported 6x86 (M1), 6x86MX (M2) w/ Linear Burst Mode
Intel CPUs Supported Pentium, Pentium MMX
Cache Type Synchronous Pipeline Burst Cache
Maximum Supported Size 384MB
Maximum Cacheable DRAM Area 256MB
Memory Maximum DRAM Supported 384MB
BEDO DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) N/A
EDO DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-2-2-2
FPM DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-3-3-3
SDRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-1-1-1
Data Path to Memory 64-bits
ECC Support No
Hard Disk Controller Chip Integrated Controller
Busmastering Support Yes
UltraDMA Support Yes
Max. Theoretical Transfer Rate PIO Mode 5/DMA Mode 3 (33.3MB/S)
PCI Interface Supported PCI Bus Speeds 25, 30, 33 MHz
Concurrent PCI Yes
Async. PCI Bus Speed Yes
PCI Specification 2.1 (66 MHz max.)
Power Management PC97 Compliance Yes
Suspend to Disk Yes
HDD Power Down Yes
Modem Wakeup Yes
System Suspend Yes
Video AGP Support No
Unified Memory Architecture Yes (onboard VGA)
Peripheral Support USB Support Yes
Plug and Play Port Yes
Write Buffers CPU-to-DRAM Unknown
CPU-to-PCI Unknown
PCI-to-DRAM Unknown
Officially Supported Bus Speeds 50, 60, 66, 75 MHz
Unofficially Achieved Bus Speeds 83 MHz
SiS 5571 SiS 5598
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  • vortmax2 - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link

    The good ole' days when you could put multiple vendor CPUs into the same motherboard. So simple...
  • PentiumGeek - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link

    This motherboard was on my 1st PC. I was very disappointed when faced with the problem that DIMM and SIMM memory can't work in the same time. I used Pentium 100Mhz CPU on this motherboard :)
  • Amadeus777999 - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link

    Got an ASUS P2L97 board yesterday and I'm reading through this while DoomII is benchmarking. Good times.
  • rogerjowett - Sunday, May 17, 2020 - link

    Does n e 1 know where I can find a Voltage Regulation Module please

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