It's hard to believe that our first look at a dual Athlon 760MP based motherboard was so long ago. June 5, 2001 was the day that the NDA expired on Tyan's Thunder K7, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, over a year and a half later, the dual Athlon is giving way to newer and better things (Opteron anyone?). Since this is likely our last dual Athlon motherboard review (unless the rumors are true and we do get an updated chipset for Barton), it only seems fitting that we're looking at Tyan's Thunder K7X Pro. This review is making me feel nostalgic, so I'm going to crank-up the "Way Back Machine™" and give a bit of a history lesson here.

Tyan's "Thunder" line of motherboards is geared towards the higher-end workstation and server market. The Thunder K7 had the trimmings of a nice workstation board, but the midrange server application was where it was meant to be used. With dual onboard NICs, SCSI and angled DIMM slots, it had "rackmount" written all over it.

Unfortunately for Tyan, the Thunder K7 was released before an industry standard power supply was agreed upon. The newer/faster processors were requiring more and more from the power supply, so AMD went ahead spec'd an ATX-GES power supply. The rest industry didn't agree though, and the Thunder K7 ended-up using a unique configuration, thus making power supplies harder to find and more expensive to purchase.

The 760MP chipset finally gave way to the 760MPX chipset and, consequently, the Thunder K7 gave way to the Thunder K7X. Sticking with the angled DIMM slots, SCSI and dual NICs onboard, the Thunder K7X followed closely in the TK7's footsteps. The only major thing that changed was the PCI slot configuration.

The 760MPX was built with PCI bandwidth in mind, and the TK7X showed-up sporting 64bit 66mhz PCI rather than the 64bit 33mhz slots of it's older brother. Not only did the PCI slots run faster, they were also seperated from the normal PCI bus to further increase bandwidth. Even though the industry had settled on the "WTX" and then "EPS12V" power supply standards, the Thunder K7X was hindered by the same proprietary connections as the Thunder K7. Bummer.

In the meantime, other companies were coming out with motherboards based on the 760MPX chipset, most of which only required a normal ATX or ATX12V power supply. While the number of boards available was growing, nobody seemed interested in trying to take the dual AMD server market away from Tyan. Tyan's Thunder K7X was the lone server-centric dual Athlon board on the market (just as the Thunder K7 was before it).

Not content to rest on their laurels, Tyan decided to give the Thunder K7X an overhaul. Sort of a "last hurrah" before the Opteron takes over as AMD's DP platform de jour. Although the MPX chipset had pretty much hit its limits in the available motherboards, Tyan found a few ways to add some value and tweak some more performance out of the already impressive Thunder K7X... and they called it the Thunder K7X Pro!

What they changed >>