Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466) AMD-760 MPX Motherboard (Tyan Trinity 400 S1854)

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Product:	Tyan Trinity 400 S1854
Date:	13/03/02 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, Reliable

Disadvantages: Installation (for beginners and some Inter)

I know I was suppost to comment on the Tyan S1854 Trinity 400, but I thought that the Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466) would be much more interesting so here I go:

It?s hard to believe that it was as long ago as October that we first began to hear the sounds of another dual-Athlon chipset from AMD. Our first bits of news actually came from motherboard manufacturers that told me they had solutions on the chipset almost ready and I that I would have them for testing within a couple weeks. As you might have guessed, this was not the way things worked out.
AMD delayed the chipset for quite some time, for various reasons ? both technical and marketing. Technically, the 760MPX chipset was having some south bridge problems around the memory controllers and the USB controllers. And in some cases, this is still true. The first motherboards based on this chipset, though AMD claims to have it worked out, will include an external USB card for the safety and stability of their products. As far as the marketing concerns go, AMD was really in no rush to push the 760 MPX chipset out the door. The initial buzz around the ability to have a dual-Athlon system had died down and those that wanted on the bandwagon were on it ? those that weren?t on the wagon weren?t on the edge of their seat for another chipset. The main purpose in releasing the chipset is mainly to attract more of the business and server markets from Intel, as the sole new feature of the chipset is based around a technology that never really hit hard in the PC enthusiast and retail segment: 64-bit 66 MHz PCI.
In any event, the chipset is done, and motherboards are available for you to consider should you want the power of a dual-Athlon computer! The first up is Tyan?s Tiger MPX motherboard. Here are the initial specs:
It?s hard to believe that it was as long ago as October that we first began to hear the sounds of another dual-Athlon chipset from AMD. Our first bits of news actually came from motherboard
manufacturers that told me they had solutions on the chipset almost ready and I that I would have them for testing within a couple weeks. As you might have guessed, this was not the way things worked out.

AMD delayed the chipset for quite some time, for various reasons ? both technical and marketing. Technically, the 760MPX chipset was having some south bridge problems around the memory controllers and the USB controllers. And in some cases, this is still true. The first motherboards based on this chipset, though AMD claims to have it worked out, will include an external USB card for the safety and stability of their products. As far as the marketing concerns go, AMD was really in no rush to push the 760 MPX chipset out the door. The initial buzz around the ability to have a dual-Athlon system had died down and those that wanted on the bandwagon were on it ? those that weren?t on the wagon weren?t on the edge of their seat for another chipset. The main purpose in releasing the chipset is mainly to attract more of the business and server markets from Intel, as the sole new feature of the chipset is based around a technology that never really hit hard in the PC enthusiast and retail segment: 64-bit 66 MHz PCI.
In any event, the chipset is done, and motherboards are available for you to consider should you want the power of a dual-Athlon computer! The first up is Tyan?s Tiger MPX motherboard. Here are the initial specs:

Motherboard Specifications
CPU Socket 2 x Socket A (200/266 MHz Support)
Chipset AMD-760 MPX
Form Factor ATX
Multiplier Options default only
Bus Speed Options 100 / 133 MHz
Voltages default only
Memory Support 4 x 184-pin DDR DRAM PC1600/PC2100 Support
Expansion Slots 6/0/1/0 (PCI/ISA/AGP/CNR)
2 x 64-bit / 66 MHz PCI
4 x 32-bit / 33 MHz PCI
AGP Support 4x AGP
USB Support on-board disabled
4-port card included
Integrated Components none <
br>Bios Award Bios
Onboard IDE 2 x ATA100 EIDE

Since the inception of the dual-Athlon segment of AMD?s market, Tyan has continually been the first and only on the side of manufacturers for the boards. And while this is no longer the case, they are still the first. The first two boards, the Tyan Thunder K7 and the Tyan Tiger MP were based around the original AMD-760 MP chipset and were very impressive for their market segments. The Thunder offered the very first glimpse at dual-Athlons running in a home system or server and the Tiger followed up with a lower cost solution to help even more home users enter in this new market with AMD?s Athlon MP processors.

Now the Tiger MPX will attempt to offer a mix of low-cost for home users and high-use for server usage.

The physical layout of the board is very similar to the Tiger MP motherboard, but has a few key differences that should be pointed out. The very first and one of the best new features on the board is in the power connectors. If you?ll remember, the Thunder K7, the original dual-Athlon motherboard, required a completely new standard of power supply that was previously used for any AMD system. This was a complete pain in my side, and the Tiger MP fixed this by cutting out many of the on-board features and allowing a standard ATX power connector to be the sole power source for the board. On the new Tiger MPX, there is a mix. Because Tyan is looking to supply the most stable motherboards out, they have combined the two ideas into a great powering option for the motherboard. If you are using a base load on the system (such as only a single hard drive, CD-Rom, etc) you only need to attach the standard ATX power connector to the board. However, as processor speeds increase, or you add more power-draining components to your system (like SCSI cards, RAID controllers, hard drives, etc) you?ll need to give the board more power to remain stable. You have two options for this: first, if
you have the newer ATX 2.02 power supplies that have a 4-pin ATX 12V cable, simply hook that up to spot next to the ATX power connector. However, even if you don?t have that kind of power supply, you can use a standard 4-pin power connector (the same your hard drive uses). This allows nearly everyone to use the Tiger MPX in his or her system. Thus far, I have not seen this feature on any other MPX boards ? Tyan may have an Ace in their hand here.

The CPU sockets are in exactly the same position as before, with a row of capacitors in between them. I must tell you that it can make installation of the heatsinks a little more work than you are used to, but unless your heatsinks are gargantuan, they will fit.

The north bridge of the 760 MPX chipset is covered by the same heatsink that the Tiger MP used, keeping the very hot running chipset from causing any kind of stability problems. An active cooling solution may have been a better solution, but because there is very little tweaking and overclocking you can do on the board, it shouldn?t be too much of a problem.

The Tyan Tiger MPX supports up to 4 GB of memory using the 4 DIMM slots on the board. Tyan may recommend that you have all of your memory be Registered for the best stability, but in my testing, standard PC2100 memory will work fine in the first and second slots, but if you go over into the third and fourth slot, you are taking a chance on the system?s over stability. I did run all four slots full of 256 MB standard Crucial PC2100 memory for a couple hours of testing, just to see, and I didn?t encounter any problems. But if you call Tyan complaining about issues with the board, be prepared to answer that question first.

The slot configuration of the motherboard is as follows: 1 4x AGP slot, 2 64-bit/66 MHz PCI slots, 4 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slots. This is probably new to most of you. The 64-bit/66 MHz PCI slots are mainly used for components cards that need incredibly high am
ounts of bandwidth to the processor and memory. A good example would be a SCSI/RAID controller. These controllers could take advantage of the extra speed that the bus offers them to the chipset to vastly increase performance. For a good introduction to this concept of how bandwidth effects are changed, see the first page of the AMI Elite 1600 SCSI card.

You should also note that your standard PCI cards will not work in the 64-bit slots, and vise-versa. So, that means you are limited to 4 PCI slots for your regular cards. And, in actuality, you are limited to 3 of them if you want to have USB functions.

Why is that? Well, as I mentioned earlier, AMD was having problems with the USB on the new south bridge, so as to avoid problems, Tyan has disable the USB functions of the south bridge on the Tyan Tiger MPX, meaning the headers for USB at the top of the motherboard are useless. To help you out, Tyan has included a USB 1.1 PCI card that offers 4 USB headers. While that will help those with more USB components and it isn?t a real hassle to install it, it is kind of a pain to see one of your few PCI slots gone before you install anything else.

Finally, the Tiger MPX has a working 10/100 NIC header on the board that can be used to save one of your PCI slots, so that is very good news. The board only includes two ATA100 IDE channels, and IDE-RAID is out of the question as far as Tyan is concerned.

Sadly, there are no overclocking options available on the Tiger MPX motherboard unless you include the option to switch between 100 MHz and 133 MHz front-side buses an overclock. I didn?t think so! :) This shouldn?t be a big surprise though as Tyan has never catered their boards to the overclocker. They are more concerned with created a stable platform that performs well under all the conditions you can throw at it. The previous Thunder K7 and Tiger MP are the same way ? and they excelled at doing just that.

The system setup for t
his test has only the Tyan Tiger MPX against one of the top single processor motherboards out now, the Abit KR7A-RAID based on the KT266A chipset. Because the Tiger MP and the Thunder K7 are so closely related, I wouldn?t recommend upgrading from either of those to the MPX unless you NEED the 64-bit PCI. Otherwise, chances are you are considering either a top single-CPU system or a top dual-CPU system.

Keep in mind that the fastest Athlon XP out is the 2000+, running at 1.67 GHz, while the fastest Athlon MP out is the 1900+, running at 1.6 GHz. That means that the comparisons are slightly off. But, rather than retesting the Abit system with a slower processor, I will attempt to just show how things might change ? although it will be very little.

Of course, because we are dealing with a new dual-processor setup, we had to include some of the benchmarks that usually left off the test suite in single-processor boards. Benchmarks like CliBench and Photoshop show off the potential that the AMD-760 MPX chipset can offer.
Test System Setup
CPU 2 x 1.60 GHz AMD Athlon MP 1900+ Processors
1 x 1.67 GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Processor
Motherboards Tyan Tiger MPX
Abit KR7A-RAID
Memory 1 x 512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE
Video Card GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 22.40
Operating System Windows XP

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
DronezMark
Wolfenstein MP
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2002
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark
Sysmark 2001
CliBench III
Linux Compilation
Adobe Photoshop


So thats it some good installation tips and test's sorry I carn't comment on the test's anymore but I am busy cooking.

Hope you have enjoyed the read:)

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