Articles: Mainboards

Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 Review [03/02/2000 12:00 AM | Mainboards]
by FastSite

This mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A features both: Slot 1 and Socket370. On the whole, it turned avery stable and interesting piece.

With the time those of you who admire mainboards on non-Intel chipsets get more and more arguments for their point ofview. Of course, the main argument has been known for a long time already: only a mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A can supportall the today's coolest features (such as AGP 4x mode, UltraDMA/66 and 133MHz FSB), perform quite well and at the same timehave a reasonable price. As we have already mentioned in our reviews, the main opponent of VIA Apollo Pro133A is i820, whichshows relatively low performance in combination with SDRAM. However, the opinion that all mainboards built on VIA chipsets arevery unstable, makes most users consider i440BX the best today's chipset, which is absolutely unfair to VIA. In this review wewill try to help you get rid of this prejudice.

First of all, VIA Apollo Pro133A based mainboards attracted Tyan - a famous American mainboard manufacturer known for itsserver solutions and high quality products. And secondly, another well-known manufacturer - Micron chose these particularmainboards on VIA chipset for its Millenia Max PC family. That is why all problems with the mainboards on VIA chipsetsusually occur not because of the chipset errors but because of the negligence and inaccuracy of some mainboard manufacturers,who try to make their products as cheap as possible at any rate. Sure, VIA Apollo Pro133A, as any other new chipset, was notdeprived of some defects, which could crop up if the system was equipped with certain graphics cards. However, all the latestchipset and driver revisions are very likely to be absolutely correct and improved by the time you are reading this review.

So, let's pass over to our today's hero - Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 mainboard.

Specification

CPU
- Single Slot 1 connector
- Single Socket 370 connector
- Supports 66, 100 and 133MHz FSB
- Supports Intel Celeron/Pentium II/Pentium III processors working at 233-600MHz and up (doesnot support older Intel Pentium II CPUs with 2.8V Vcore)
Chipset
- VIA Apollo Pro133A (VT82C694X+VT82C596B)
- Winbond 83977EF I/O controller
System Memory
- Supports from 32 to 768MB system memory
- 3 x 168-pin DIMM modules
- Supports 100 and 133MHz SDRAM with SPD
- Supports VCM SDRAM
Slots
- 1 32bit AGP slot supporting 4x mode
- 6 32bit PCI slots supporting Bus Mastering
- 1 16bit ISA slot (shared with 1 PCI slot)
BIOS
- Award Plug and Play BIOS
- Supports Deep Green, Energy Star, ACPI
- PCI 2.2 and APM 1.1 compliant
Integrated IDE controller
- Supports PIO Mode 4 and Multi-word DMA Mode 2
- 2 UltraDMA/66 Bus Master IDE channels (supporting up to 4 ATAPI-devices)
Onboard I/O controller
- Supports 2 FDDs
- 2 serial ports
- 1 parallel port supporting ECP and EPP
- Infra red port connector
- 2 USB ports
- PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse
Integrated sound controller Creative Labs ES 1373 PCI (optional)
Other
- Wake on LAN and modem
- 3 fan connectors
- Chassis intrusion header
Board Dimensions
- ATX Form Factor
- 21.5cm x 30.5cm

The mainboard is supplied in a quite ordinary box with Tyan's standard design. The package includes not only the mainboard,but also 1 FDD cable, 1 UltraDMA/33 and 1 UltraDMA/66 cable and a CD-disk with all the necessary software. Tyan S1854 Trinity400 goes together with a beautifully illustrated and detailed user's manual, which will undoubtedly answer all your questionseven if you are just a beginner. Besides, the package also contains 100 free Internet hours by CompuServe, an American provider.

Closer Look

Actually, the mainboards with both: Slot 1 and Socket 370 are not so rare today. Nevertheless, some of them, such as TyanS1854 Trinity 400, for instance, still attract our attention. We have to bear in mind that S1854 Trinity 400 has a voltageregulator complying with VRM 8.4 specification, which is essential for new processors on Coppermine core, that is why thismainboard appears capable of working with Intel's sixth generation CPUs without any converters. To choose the processorsocket or slot, you simply have to switch the corresponding jumper on the board. Besides, we would like to add that S1854Trinity 400 is based on one of the most modern chipsets and supports PC133 SDRAM, 133MHz system bus, AGP 4x and UltraDMA/66.So, all in all, this mainboard seems to be the richest in various features, you could only think of today.

The mainboard has 3 slots for DIMM modules, which allow Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 to work with up to 768MB in generalusing 256MB modules. Moreover, nothing can prevent you from installing 1.5GB memory in 512MB modules, however, no onehas ever tried to check if it all works. Like any other mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset, S1854 Trinity 400supports PC100 as well as PC133 SDRAM. This chipset has an asynchronous memory bus, which works at the CPU bus frequencyand at any frequency 33MHz higher or lower than that. Therefore you don't necessarily need PC133 SDRAM with the processorswith 133MHz system bus: PC100 SDRAM will be just fine here. Besides, you can do the same thing to a processor with a 100MHzbus: just clock the memory bus to 133MHz, which will slightly increase the overall system performance. Speaking about memory,we should also mention that this mainboard supports VCM SDRAM, though the latter is not very widely spread. This memory typeimplies a buffered multichannel PC133 now manufactured only by NEC.

Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 has 1 AGP slot, 1 ISA slot and 6 PCI slots. All of them, except one PCI, support full-sizeexpansion cards. Frankly speaking, we can hardly think of a configuration with all the 6 PCI slots occupied. However,in the future this may become very easy to carry out: who knows, maybe, ATA100, Firewire IEEE 1394 and IDE RAID controllerswill get more and more popular.

The PCB design and the mounting quality do not deserve any censure: Tyan is Tyan. However, to our great disappointment,S1854 Ttrinity 400 failed to avoid a very "popular" problem with DIMM slots. The thing is that if there is a graphics cardinstalled into the AGP, the clips on the DIMM slots get blocked, so that you can neither remove nor install the memorymodules. Although there are both, a slot and a socket, Tyan engineers managed to make the board just a bit bigger: S1854Trinity 400 is even narrower than some ordinary ATX-boards. That's why S1854 Trinity 400 can fit easily into any ATX case.

The connectors for IDE-devices and FDDs as well as the power supply connector are located according to the ATX spec -in the lower right corner. This ensures that the cables in the case will be very conveniently placed and hence the CPUcooling will be very efficient.

For the South Bridge the mainboard uses VT82C596B microchip, which is, actually, initially intended for mobile solutions.Tyan probably decided on this particular microchip because they didn't want to deal with AC'97 codec. Exactly for this reasonwe get no software sound as well as no AMR slot. Tyan suggested using an integrated (optional) microchip by Creative Labs ES1373 PCI to replace the software AC'97 sound. This microchip will implement all the basic functions including the MIDI and3D-sound without overloading the system CPU. By the way, for some reason the mainboard has no jumper to disable this soundcontroller. That is why you will be able to do something about it only via Windows, if this controller is from the verybeginning integrated on your mainboard.

Having chosen VT82C596B as a South Bridge instead of a more common VT82C686A, S1854 Trinity 400 lost two extra USBports. So, now it has only two of them, while most mainboards built on VIA Apollo Pro133A can boast four of them.

Besides, VT82C596B doesn't support hardware monitoring. For this purpose Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 may have a Winbond 83783S,which is slightly poorer, though: it takes 1 temperature, 6 voltages and the rotations of 2 fans. With a special thermaldiode integrated into the core it takes the CPU temperature. However, thery also manufacture mainboards with no hardware monitoring.

The board's BIOS is based on Award 4.51PG. Nevertheless, it offers not only versatile configuring of memory timings andAGP and PCI buses, which is quite usual for mainboards on VIA chipsets. It can also boast some absolutely unique features.In particular, it allows disabling AGP 4x mode, which may turn out very helpful while solving stability problems of somegraphics cards. Besides, BIOS Setup also allows enabling Fast Writes mode, however, we wouldn't recommend doing it for thetime being, at least until NVIDIA's drivers support it appropriately. At present, enabling Fast Writes leads to dramaticperformance drop in games. Unfortunately, we have to draw your attention to the fact that BIOS Setup does not allow toassign IRQs to PCI slots manually, which may make hardware conflicts harder to settle.

Another setting in BIOS Setup, which is worth mentioning here, is CPU IOQ Size. It can be set to "4 level" or "1 level".This option sets the depth of the processor bus in-order queue, i.e. the level of processor bus pipelining. In other words,if you set CPU IOQ Size to 1 level, there will be no pipelining support on the processor bus. But the most surprising thinghere is that 1 level is automatically set as default although 4 level increases the overall performance by nearly 15%!However, in fact, there is nothing to be surprised with, especially taking into account that Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 isused in Micron computers. It looks as if Micron decided to increase the stability of its systems at the expense of theirperformance and hence disabled the processor bus pipelining. By the way, ABIT used the same approach in its overclockerfriendly mainboards, which made the entire system perform more stable at higher frequencies. In this respect, we wouldadvise the happy owners of S1854 Trinity 400 to install CPU IOQ Size to 4 level in all cases except the cases of extremeoverclocking where this option may help increase the system reliability.

Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 can boast colored connectors (according to PC99 spec). Besides, the mainboard comes preinstalledwith a jointed CPU retention mechanism, which supports are types of cartridges and a small piezo-speaker.

Overclocking

Before we start discussing this topic, we would like to state right away that Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 mainboard is notthe best choice for extreme overclockers. In fact, we really doubt if Tyan was planning to ever develop a product like that.Nevertheless, it is still possible to squeeze something out of S1854 Trinity 400, which we are going to discuss here.

The system bus of our hero is set through BIOS Setup and does not need any jumper manipulations. In fact, the only jumpersexisting on the board (besides CMOS clearing and selecting a slot or a socket) are those serving to set the processor clockmultiplier, which have now lost all their significance. The processor bus of S1854 Trinity 400 supports only 12 frequencies:66, 75, 83, 95, 100, 112, 117, 124, 133, 138, 140 and 150MHz.

Not too cool compared to the today's mainboards, but still. For overclockers the main advantages of Tyan S1854 Trinity400, as of any other VIA Apollo Pro133A based board, are the officially supported 133MHz FSB (i.e. 1/2 AGP divider) and thepossibility to change the memory frequency independently from FSB. As a result, you can work at 133MHz FSB, while the memoryis only 100MHz. Together these two features are more efficient for processor overclocking than those provided by i440BX basedboards: you simply set the system bus frequency higher than 133MHz and nothing more.

However, Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 doesn't have any specific functions for overclocking. There is no way to set manually theAGP and PCI dividers as well as to change Vcore and Vio (memory chipset and AGP voltage). Moreover, there is one more especiallyupsetting thing: it appears absolutely impossible to clear the CPU settings in BIOS if you overclock the CPU too high andthe mainboard doesn't boot at all. In this case you will have to open the case and to clear CMOS settings with a jumper.

But this is also not the very end. The gravest problem about the processor overclocking on S1854 Trinity 400 is the AGPdivider. To set it the mainboard uses the info about FSB frequency provided by the CPU. It means that if we install IntelCeleron, then the AGP frequency will be always equal to FSB frequency no matter which FSB frequency we had in BIOS Setupbeforehand. The same thing happens if we install a 100MHz CPU: the AGP frequency will always be equal to 2/3 of the FSB.And only if the processor used is intended for 133MHz FSB, we will get AGP equal to 1/2 of the FSB frequency.

What should an overclocker do then? Of course, there is a way-out, but it works only with Socket 370 processors. Insteadof the available Socket 370, you should use a Slot 1-to-Socket 370 converter, which installs into Slot 1, supports 133MHz busand allows setting the processor core voltage. You manipulate the jumpers on the converter, so that to get the desired frequency(66/100/133MHz) bearing in mind the AGP divider ([1]/[2/3]/[1/2]). Then you set the required FSB frequency in BIOS Setup. In theend, an inventive overclocker will get any possible combination of AGP and FSB frequencies.

Acting in the described way, we managed to overclock Intel Pentium III 500E FC-PGA up to 750MHz. Having set the FSB to 133MHzon the converter, we managed to involve the top frequency of 150MHz this mainboard ever allowed. Unfortunately, it wasimpossible to increase the FSB frequency further, although this CPU overclocked even more on Chaintech 6ATA4, for instance.When we installed this CPU (intended for 100MHz) directly into Socket 370 of Tyan S1854 Trinity 400, the maximum FSB frequencywe managed to get was 117MHz and then the system crashed because of the graphics card, which couldn't put up with higher AGPfrequency.

Performance

Theoretically, the mainboards based on one and the same chipset should perform very close to each other and thesedifferences should be very insignificant to pay attention to when choosing a mainboard. We have already discussed theperformance of the modern chipsets that is why all of us are aware that VIA Apollo Pro133A based mainboards prove muchbetter than their fellows on i820+SDRAM. At the same time, VIA Apollo Pro133A is just a little bit behind i440BX, whichdoes not support 133MHz CPUs. Therefore, VIA Apollo Pro133A turns out the most preferable choice among the today's chipsets(of course, if we disregard the inevitable out-dating i440BX).

We compared a couple of recently launched mainboards on i820 and VIA Apollo Pro133A. The test system was configured asfollows:

Intel Pentium III 600EB (4.5x133) CPU
Creative 3DBlaster Annihilator graphics card
Creative Sound Blaster Live! sound card
IBM DJNA 372200 HDD
128MB PC133 SDRAM by Micron

You should always keep in mind that although we used PC133 SDRAM, i820 based mainboards work with it at 100MHz only becauseof the chipset peculiar construction.

As we can see, Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 proved not only stable and reliable, but also showed brilliant performance. Todayit is the fastest mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset of all mainboards we have already tested.

Conclusions

Well, if you are looking for an up-to-date mainboard, stable and efficient at work, and if you are not crazy aboutoverclocking your CPU to death, then you have every reason to decide on this product from Tyan. If you refer yourselfto dedicated overclockers, then you will probably be disappointed with Tyan S1854 Trinity 400.

Highs