Tyan's S8154 - Trinity 400

VIA Apollo Pro133A with AGP4X
     

Benchmarks

 

Our Test System

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 533B (supplied by Outside Loop Computers), Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 Motherboard, 128MB PC133 HSDRAM from EMS, WD Expert AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, Gigabyte GA660Plus TNT2 Ultra w/ 32MB, Shuttle 56X CDROM, Win 98SE, DirectX 7, NVidia Detonator Reference Drivers Version 3.53
This is the same exact setup we used on the Soyo review with the obvious exception of the processor clock speed which was limited to 533 MHz. Here's how the American made contender faired clock for clock!

SiSoft's Sandra 99 - Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 - 533MHz.
     

SiSoft's Sandra 99 - Soyo SY-6VBA-133 - 533MHz.
 
The Tyan board comes in at a very close second. I was surprised to see any delta at all frankly but I am not as comfortable with the repeatability of the Sandra Tests, so we'll fire up Winbench 99.
 

 ZD Winbench 99
 
A much closer race than the Sandra Benchmark. This is more in line with what we expected to see. No clear advantage here either way in our opinion.
 

AGP 4X Performance

Ahh, the moment you have all been waiting for. What exactly does AGP 4X give you for performance gains in 3D Gaming on a card that supports AGP4X? We fired up the TNT2 Ultra Card from Gigabyte which does support AGP4X and then enabled AGP4X in the BIOS. Here are the results.
Can you say zilch?! As you can easily see here AGP4X, at least as far as the TNT2 goes, provides almost no benefit. At some point AGP4X will come of age and Graphics Card manufacturers will take advantage of the increased bandwidth it has to offer. However, that day is not here yet. Sorry folks, I wanted to believe in it too.
     
     

Summation

In short, this is a well made, high quality board from Tyan. With a few small concerns along the way, we feel it is a solid entry into the PC133 Motherboard arena. It also has great flexibility for system integrators in terms of its ability to utilize all of the various PC Based CPUs from Intel that are being manufactured at this point in time. On the other hand, the hard core overclocking community should take note that this board is not able to offer the tweaks you are accustomed to. At some point we really hope Tyan steps up and brings this option to the table with a BIOS revision. (BIG HINT TYAN!)

We give the Tyan S1854 Trinity a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter Rating of...

83

-Davo

Update!  2/28/00 -The  VIA Apollo Pro133A gets faster.  -->

Temp-O-Meter scores are rated on a number of key metrics including performance, stability, ease of installation, compatibility, feature set, "overclockability" and component quality. A perfect score is 100