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Tyan Tiger 133 (S1834D)

The Tiger 133 could possibly be the most anticipated dual processor motherboard that I can remember (except maybe the BP6 from Abit). Ever since Intel released it's new Coppermine line of Pentium III's, the dual processor community has been scrambling for a motherboard with "real" support for things like AGP4x, ATA66 and the 133mhz FSB. Evidently it hasn't been an easy road for the manufacturers either. It's been four or five months since the Coppermines hit the streets, and (until now) there were still no motherboards to run them in. That is of course, unless you felt like mortgaging your house to finance some Rambus.

VIA splashed into the dual processor market when they announced that their Apollo Pro133A chipset did indeed support SMP! Woohoo! Now we had the opportunity to get an SDRam/Coppermine supporting chipset on a dual board without blowing the bankroll. Needless to say, it didn't take long for manufacturers to catch on either.

A month ago at Computex, all of us duallie types were drooling over all the new motherboards on display that featured the Apollo Pro 133A chipset and a pair of sockets or slots. There has also been multiple companies that have announced new dual boards but the first to market here in the states was from Tyan, in the form of the Tiger 133 (S1834D).

Enter the Tiger 133...

The Tiger 133 got off to quite a rocky start. The first few runs of the board were quite buggy and the board earned a reputation as, well, a piece of junk. Tyan has been making quality motherboards (especially dual motherboards) for some time and they weren't content to leave it at that. The Tiger 133 was pulled from production until all the bugs were fixed. Some damage to their reputation was done though, and there were more than a few skeptics (including myself). Does the Tiger 133 live up to the "Tiger" name? After all, the Tiger 100 is probably the board for an entry level server or high-end workstation.

I guess we'll see ;-)

The Specs...

Here's what Tyan has on their site. I think they speak for themselves ;-)

So... That's all fine and dandy, but how does it run?!?

The Installation...

As I said before, I was more than a little skeptical of the Tiger 133. According to a slew of people on our forums, the board was nothing but bad news. Luckily, my apprehensions were unfounded. What can I say about the install... It went flawlessly! I even tried to get it to lockup by using what seems to be the most problematic hardware that I could scrounge. It all worked (with one exception that I will discuss later). The test system consisted of:

• Tyan Tiger 133 rev.F BIOS 1.03c
• MSI SDR GeForce 256
• CreativeLabs SoundBlaster Live! Value
• Western Digital 13.5gb UDMA66 (5400rpm) harddrive
• CreativeLabs 52x CDRom
• 3Com 905B-TX 10/100 NIC
• 128mb Crucial PC133 (CL2) SDRam (x2)
• Intel PIII 600E's (slot1) cB0 (x2) [From OutsideLoop]

I mounted the motherboard in the case and installed all the hardware. The first problem I have with this board is the jumper settings for the CPU multiplier. Although most dual BX motherboards use jumpers of some sort, I thought maybe we could get past the hassle with the newer, cooler motherboards... Nope. I also found it strange that there were no jumper settings for the FSB. I have a pair of cB0 PIII 600E's that'll do 800 at default voltage and quite frankly, I was ready to "air them out" :-) Oh well, maybe in the BIOS? I booted the machine and everything seemed to be going fine. I entered the BIOS and immediately loaded the "Optimized Default" settings. Then I started with the tweaking...

The first thing I did was set all of the memory settings I could find to their fastest settings. I bumped the CAS Latency to 2 and the memory timing to "Turbo". I knew the VIA chipset was going to be a bit slower in the memory bandwidth department, so I figured I'd nip it in the bud as much as I could.

My next stop was the ACPI settings where I enabled "Power Management" and set it to "User Define". Something that has been a thorn in my side for a while was the lack of support for the MPS 1.4 spec. For those of you who don't know what the MPS setting does, it allows your OS (Win2k Pro in this case) to assign a sort of "virtual IRQ" to your devices (among other things). The first time you see your video card assigned to IRQ 20 is a bit disconcerting, but if you have an IRQ hungry system, this can make a world of difference! Fortunately, the MPS 1.4 spec is supported by the Tiger 133.

From here on out, it was a cakewalk. I booted to the Win2k Pro CD and a while later I had an "ACPI Multiprocessor PC". JC will be happy to note that ACPI does work and it does work flawlessly. Support for Win2k's advanced power saving features was ready to rumble from the first reboot. I installed the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers, then my drivers for video and sound and I was off and running.

I never did find the FSB setting in the BIOS, and for good reason... It's not there! In fact, this motherboard has no ability to adjust the FSB speed at all (Pin taping anyone?). Tyan said this was due to the fact that the board is geared towards the Server and high-end workstation crowd, but I find this to be a bit confusing. With no onboard SCSI, LAN, or anything for that matter, and a price of (around) $150USD, this board seems poised to replace the Tiger 100 (which does have FSB settings in the BIOS).

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