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Tyan
Tiger 200 (S2505)
It wasn't so long ago that we were waiting
in anticipation for the new crop of dual processor motherboards to hit
the streets. The venerable BX chipset was beginning to get old and more
importantly, it was lacking some of the newer, cooler features of the
"alternative" chipsets. What was a duallie lover to do?!?
Along came VIA with an announcement that
their latest baby, the Apollo Pro 133A chipset would indeed support the
use of dual processors and souls rejoiced. Weeks and months passed, rumors
flew, and all the while we waited... And waited... And waited...
Finally after months of waiting we were blessed
(or cursed as it may seem to some) with the Tyan
Tiger 133. The first dual processor mainboard based on the
Apollo Pro 133A chipset to hit the market. We quickly realized that like
every new chipset/motherboard, the Tiger 133 was less than perfect but
after a few BIOS updates, PCB revisions, and some careful hardware selection
even the Tiger 133 proved to be a stable and reliable foundation for a
workstation.
Fast forward 6 months...
Not content to rest on their laurels, Tyan
was busy building on their experiences (good and bad) with the Tiger 133.
The Slot1 interface was going the way of the Dodo and people were screaming
for a stable dual Socket 370 solution. Tyan answered the call with a whole
slew of new and "yet to be released" motherboards, the first
of which is the Tiger 200. Let's see what it has to offer:
As you can plainly see from the picture above,
the Tiger 200 is geared specifically towards the entry level server market.
Onboard video, dual NICs and IDE RAID make this motherboard a plug-and-play
installation for a SOHO server. The only thing left to buy for a complete
machine would be CPUs, memory and drives.
While this board is perfectly suited for
2U rackmounted server duty, it really shouldn't be pigeonholed as such.
Tyan realized the need for a feature rich workstation board as well so
they saw fit to include a 4x AGP slot in addition to the onboard ATi Rage
XL graphics. A very smart move in my opinion as this opens the board's
appeal to a wider market of users (beyond just the SOHO server space).
Let's take a look...
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