Introduction
FIC, a subsidiary of VIA, played a big role the early days of the Athlon platform as they were one of the first manufacturers to come out with Athlon based motherboards. Over the last few years though FIC has not been as prominent in the motherboard business becoming more of a second-tier manufacturer. Instead, they have diversified a bit and are better known for producing/reselling ATi's graphics card lines (as shown by our 9800 Pro and 9200 reviews).
The KT-748 is based on the SiS 748 chipset, which is SiS' latest FSB200-supporting chipset (i.e. it supports the Barton 3200+). However, unlike the nForce 2 chipset, the SiS 748 is similar to the KT600 as it is only a single channel memory design.
Moving away from the single-chip north/southbridge design of the SiS 735 chipset, the SiS 748 design returns to the standard approach of having the chips separated. Connecting the two is SiS' patented MuTIOL bus link, which is 16-bit and runs at 533 mhz, providing 1 GB/sec worth of bandwidth between the chips.
However, FIC is still marketing this board as a budget motherboard, one that you find in those $699 computers you see from local white-box system builders. Many of us look for some of the cheapest motherboards for family and friends, so we'll see whether or not this motherboard qualifies as being one of the best bangs for the buck similar to the infamous ECS K7S5A.
Let's compare how much further the SiS chipset has advanced since the first SiS 735 chipset for the Athlon back in 2001.
| SiS 735 | SiS 745 | SiS 746 | SiS 746FX | SiS 748 | |
| System bus | 266 | 266 | 266 | 333 | 400 |
| Memory bus | 266 | 333 | 333 | 400 | 400 |
| Memory amount | 1.5 GB | 3 GB | 3 GB | 3 GB | 3 GB |
| AGP Interface | 4x | 4x | 8x | 8x | 8x |
| IDE Interface | ATA-100 | ATA-100 | ATA-133 | ATA-133 | ATA-133 |
| USB Connectivity | 3x USB 1.1 | 3x USB 1.1 | 6x USB 2.0 | 6x USB 2.0 | 6x USB 2.0 |
