Friday, July 09, 1999

Introduction

Tyan is not a new comer into the motherboard arena and with the strength of its 10 years of expertise they know very well the art of designing a new motherboard. The Trinity S1598 super 7 is just another one of the many motherboards offered by Tyan. This Super 7 motherboard is using the 5/2/1 design as most of the modern products and is coming with 512K, 1Mb or 2Mb of onboard L2 cache. Based around the VIA MVP3 100MHz chipset, the Trinity S1598 is supporting AMD K6-2 and K6-3 as well as Cyrix and IDT processors. By the way, the Tyan Trinity S1598 uses the VIA MVP4 south bridge chip VT82C686, and thus it is ATA66 capable - a feature that sets this board apart from the super 7 pack. Let's see what else has to offer this motherboard in the following review.

The features

Coming with 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots and one AGP port., the Trinity S1598 has three 168 pins DIMM sockets to support up to 768Mb of memory. Except for the PCI slot number 2, all the others slots can accept full lenght cards.

On this motherboard, several series of jumpers are available to select the clock frequency, the multiplier and the processor core voltage. Clock frequencies spreads from 60Mhz to 100Mhz by including: 60Mhz, 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 95Mhz and 100Mhz.

The available multipliers are spanning from 2.5X to 5.5X in steps of 0.5X. The voltage of the processor core can be adjusted between 1.3 volts and 3.5 volts.

The additional features incorporated, are including: the Wake on LAN, the Wake On Modem ring, PS2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, a SB-LINK header, IRDI header, USB connectors, keyboard power on, processor voltage and temperature monitoring and 2 three pins fan speed monitoring support.

Below, an excellent picture of the Tyan Trinity S1598 motherboard gives a good view on its components layout.

Installation

The installation of this motherboard is not as simple as a jumperless motherboard and great care must be taken when setting all the required jumpers as there are 13 of them to be set. Once this is accomplished, the motherboard is ready to be installed into the computer casing.

The software bundle.

The software bundle provided with the Tyan Trinity S1598 is including: the Via IRQ-AGP-VXD patches for Windows, the Via Bus master drivers, the UDMA drivers and the CD version of the users manual.

To be continued next page with: The performances test results.