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Unreal
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DirectX 8 Gaming
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Once again, the
Tyan S2662 plays second fiddle to competing products from
ASUS and Intel, despite a lofty price tag.
So here's the
skinny... Tyan has done a wonderful job at ensuring a system
equipped with a Trinity 2662 will function, as advertised.
We didn't encounter any stability problems and performance
with our 3.06GHz Pentium 4 was impressive, as expected.
However, it was still below what we've already seen from
competing manufacturers. Unfortunately, the good news
ends there.
While the board
does feature an impressively clean layout, it is missing a
lot of the features that have become, dare I say, common on
competing boards. It's missing Serial ATA, IEEE 1394
and most surprisingly, a tunable BIOS. Admittedly, it
does feature AGP 8X Pro, making it an ideal candidate for a
graphics workstation, but before you jump into a $200
motherboard, make sure you've given some thought to the
applications you'll be running. If your primary use
will indeed be in an office environment, rendering 3D
scenes, this might be an ideal platform. But it's a
niche and those of us who aren't in that niche have several
other options. First, you could opt for another
"Granite Bay" board. Or, you could save some money and
go with an 845PE board, of which there are many.
Finally, you could wait a little while for Intel's 800MHz
platforms that should be surfacing within a couple of
months.
Regardless, we
walk away from the Trinity i7205 somewhat indifferent.
If I had to make a cliché analogy, I'd liken the board to
the stereotypical "girl next door." She's cool, has a
wonderful personality, but without any of the physical
features that the boys will paw over, she rarely turns
heads. And the "Granite Bay" chipset is somewhat of an
enigma in this regard. We'd love to say that the
advent of Intel's dual channel DDR memory architecture has
yielded phenomenal results, but as was just seen, it isn't
that much of a departure from the chipsets we've already got
at our disposal. Don't write it off yet, though.
Once those 800MHz front side bus processors arrive, dual
channel DDR will be necessary to provide the chip with
sufficient memory bandwidth. Yes, the future is where
we'll (hopefully) see a more tangible gain in performance.
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Features
the stability that has made Tyan a workstation
favorite
-
Intel's
Gigabit Ethernet solution
-
AGP 8X
Pro
- Prohibitive $200+
price tag
- Completely void of
adjustable BIOS settings the enthusiast would want
- Performance is often
times below Intel's more affordable i845PE platform.
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