Friday, January 11, 2002

Introduction

Traditionally, Tyan motherboards have always been engineered for serious work, such as acting as server platforms, which makes it less than surprising that most of their mobos lack Overclocking features. The Tyan Trinity 510 S2266 that we'll be testing today has inherited this time-honoured tradition, but distinguishes itself from its fore bearers with its Socket 478 interface and DDR-SDRAM-compatible VIA P4X266 chipset.

So, if that's enough to whet your interest, lets say we skip on in to the review, shall we?

Particularities

One feature of the Tyan Trinity 510 that is of particular note, and should be mentioned, is its power connectors. Unlike most Pentium 4 boards, the Trinity 510 requires only a standard ATX 2.0 power connector capable of supplying 30amps at 5v. Users shouldn't be surprised then if they open up the box, and fail to spot the traditional 6-pin and 4-pin supplementary power connectors that are part-and-parcel of most P4 mobos; the Trinity 510 has done away with them.

Configuration

Configuration of the Tyan Trinity 510 is an entirely jumperless affair. In fact, not a single on-board jumper even relates to the CPU.

Within the BIOS, users will find a function permitting them to set the CPU's clock multiplier value. Unfortunately, most people won't get much use out of this feature, as most Intel processors ship with internal multiplier locks.

Some FSB Overclocking frequencies are available but the choice is very restricted.

Another, more useful function however, allows the memory bus frequency to be set to either 100MHz or 133MHz, and a number of memory timing options can be tweaked from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu.

No options for altering the Vcore or Vio voltages are included.

Next: Technical details