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Tyan's
S8154 - Trinity 400
VIA
Apollo Pro133A with AGP4X
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Benchmarks
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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
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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! |
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SiSoft's
Sandra 99 - Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 - 533MHz.
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SiSoft's
Sandra 99 - Soyo SY-6VBA-133 - 533MHz.
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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. |
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ZD
Winbench 99
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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
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