Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

Quite the opposite from the ASUS K7M266-D, the Tyan Tiger MPX goes with the established recipe of the Tiger MP, meaning that it appears rather basic without offering anything really sophisticated. Basically, Tyan is going the way of the least resistance with their board, meaning that, e.g. the Tiger MPX is the only contender without any onboard sound at all. However, it compensates with the presence of onboard 3Com Ethernet adapter as well as leaving the USB ports in place and, most importantly by offering a total of four 32 bit standard PCI slots. For the user, the presence of the USB ports integrated into the ATX I/O headers means that, similar as in the case of the MSI K7D-L, there may be one or the other USB device that does not work, for this scenario, an additional PCI card featuring four USB ports is shipping with the board. Regardless of whether the USB PCI card is used or not, four PCI slots offer the most expandability of all three boards that we are looking at. Keep in mind that with the current BIOS revision, the USB ports do not work, I am still working on a hack to enable them, probably a few more hours and I'll have it, so keep snooping around here.

Tyan Tiger MPX
USB ports currently disabled, integrated 3Com Ethernet controller and a very basic power circuitry.

Power Circuitry

After seeing the Tiger MPX displayed for the first time at Comdex featuring the established Intersil HIP 6301 controller and a tri-phase power supply circuitry, it was somewhat disappointing to see Tyan taking two steps back and substituting the HIP6302 dual phase controller for the afore-mentioned higher-end version and simply canning the third phase including driver chips and MOSFETs. The resulting switching current ripples, therefore, require better buffering which is taken care of in the form of thirteen 2200 µF capacitors. The main problem with this layout is that the capacitors are extremely close to the CPU sockets and there is very little space to maneuver any heatsink, especially with the secondary CPU (CPU1). There were, however, no problems mounting even the GlacialTech Igloo 2400 (LINK) which is one of the larger HSFs on the market.

Close-up of a Stripper
The Tiger MPX has been stripped of the third power phase. Note the missing MOSFETs and choke.

A side effect is that there are no mounting holes at all for mainboard-attached heatsinks, those holes were omitted because they would have gone through the existing traces. We had some concerns about the power circuitry solution in our review of the Tiger MP, however, afterwards, the board was running for over 4 months under full load doing RC5 duty cycles without a single hiccup. Granted that this was done with the MP1200+ and may not reflect the power demands of the 1800, 1900+ or future speedgrade MP processors, however, we had the MPX running for three weeks under the same conditions and it absolved the procedure flawlessly.

Layout

The Tiger MPX offers the standard ATX power connector together with the ATX 2.03 compliant 4 prong dual 12V jack and the adaptation of ASUS' EZ Plug. Once again, we have a passive heatsink for the North Bridge, if ASUS is using the equivalent of a skyscraper, Tyan's solution makes up for height in length and the net effect is probably the same.

In terms of expandability, the Tiger MPX is without doubt the top choice since it features actually four regular PCI slots which make it the board of choice for anyone using multiple PCI cards on top of the integrated Network and USB. Even if the add-on USB-PCI card is used, there are still three fully functional 32 bit USB slots available which is the most of the three boards reviewed here.

Jumpers

Like the MSI K7D-L, the Tiger MPX offers the option of manually forcing a 100/133 MHz FSB via jumpers J52/53 and J48/49. Note that in this case, there is a total of four jumpers to be set for the correct speed and synchronization of the FSB for both CPUs. Other jumpers can be used to enable/ disable the onboard LAN. A unique jumper is present in the form of J93 to force the PCI bus to run in asynchronous mode, that is, to force it to a locked 33 MHz bus.

The Clear CMOS is a "jumperless" two-pin header, meaning that instead of the dummy or parking pin to hold the jumper in a three pin configuration, there are only two pins and the user has to either provide her or his own jumper or else use a screw driver to short the SRAM power in order to discharge the settings from the SRAMs.

next page:    => Tyan Tiger MPX, Connectors, Expansion, BIOS =>