The layout and setup...

I'll start out by apologizing for the lack of images in this review. Unfortunately my digital camera sucks and the one I borrowed from work isn't that much better. That being said, let's kick the Tiger 200's tires a bit and see what we can see.

First things first... The board out of the box looks a little strange. Most all of the dual boards based on the VIA chipset stick pretty closely to the same basic layout, but instead of the normal staggered CPU sockets, the Tiger 200 lines them up neatly in a row. A closer look reveals a few other differences.

Being geared towards a small rackmounted enclosure (Tyan says 2U or better for this board) creates some tough decisions for a mainboard manufacturer. To keep the profile small (and even with everything built-in, the board is standard ATX size), Tyan opted for a single row of video / serial / parallel / Ethernet ports and included a cabled LPT port in the box. Without the installed LPT port, I would venture to say that the motherboard would fit fine in a 1U server case IF you could find a suitable riser card (although with all of the onboard features, you probably wouldn't need one :-).

In addition to the integrated ATi video that I mentioned before, the Tiger 200 also sports dual Intel 10/100 NICs and a Promise FastTrak100 (not the wimpy "Lite" version either! This is the full-meal-deal). Despite having all these components built-in, the Tiger 200's layout is solid and leaves plenty of room to get around... With a few exceptions. As a matter of fact, I only really encountered two problems with this board and one was my fault (but I'll get to that in a bit).

As soon as I opened the box and started assembling the system I ran into the first "problem" with this board. I had been planning on installing my trusty pair of GOrbs... No go. As you can see from the picture above, there are two capacitors between the sockets and the IO ports. There was almost enough room (and I mean that it was very close), but due to the height of the caps, those GOrbs were NOT going on that board without modification. Luckily for me my Alpha PAL6035's fit perfectly so I was good to go. One crisis averted.

I never really entertained the thought of using the onboard video for my purposes so I installed my trusty GeForce2 GTS card in the AGP slot. I found out after a quick Win2k Pro install that the onboard video needs to be disabled via jumpers and not some handy little BIOS switch. DOH! Conflicting video cards suck! Once I located the appropriate jumpers in the manual, I dove into my LiteOn FS020 with needle-nose pliers in hand only to find the jumpers I needed very difficult to get at. Had I paid attention during the installation of the board, I would have been able to avoid that whole mess. Chalk another one up to my (over)eager box building.

Other than the two minor problems I just mentioned, the installation and configuration were as easy as any other system I have ever built. Although Tyan has never really catered to the hardcore tweaking crowd, they have a solid reputation for building a good stable motherboard. This one was no exception. The included documentation (If only had I read it first) is more than adequate, and everything else needed was included in the box (driver disks, custom IO plate, ATA66/100 cables, LPT port, etc, etc). Kudos to Tyan for making the installation process as painless as possible... I just happen to like pain :-)

Two more quick words of warning before we move on to the benchmarks:

The connectors for the FastTrak100 are located at the very bottom of the motherboard. While most any mid-tower or rackmount case will be fine, users of full-towers beware. Your cables might not reach if you mount the drives too high-up or in the 5.25" bays.

Tweakers/overclockers: If you want a board that will overclock your 700E's to 933, look elsewhere. Even though there is a jumper that allows overclocking, this board supports two bus speeds and two bus speeds only... 100 and 133. There is no way to set it to anything else, and no voltage tweaking in the BIOS or otherwise.

Let's look at some numbers, shall we?

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