This might not be the best way to present this many BIOS pictures, but those of you who're genuinely interested will certainly take the time to click through them. The high-end workstation crowd is generally going to want a certain level of control via the BIOS. A lot of the devices they might be using (professional-level video cards, capture cards, etc) might be sensitive, requiring certain AGP/PCI settings. Getting a BIOS like the one found on the Tyan Thunder K7(X) could limit their abilities.

Tyan did pretty well with the Thunder i860. Clearly you won't get the level of control over the obscure that you'd find on enthusiast level boards with respect to memory tweaking, overclocking and the like but I think Tyan held up their end of the bargain in the BIOS.

The current BIOS seems to support Xeons up to 2.4GHz, but I've heard rumors circulating that Intel will take the 400MHz FSB Xeons all the way to 3GHz (and barely beyond). This being said, you can bet Tyan will be releasing BIOS updates down the road to support these processors. This should make current i860 owners happy as it appears their platform of choice isn't exactly a dead-end street just yet.

Test Systems

This could prove to be quite interesting. We can actually see how much merit there is to AMD's current PR+ rating system. Will their 2000+ Athlon MP be able to keep up with Intel's 2.0 GHz Xeon in our battery of tests? Let's see how Tyan's Thunder i860 handles itself as well.