What You Get

Like all Tyan boards, the Thunder K7X Pro comes in the familiar blue box. You also get the manual, an IO shield, IDE, floppy, and SCSI (if you get the onboard SCSI) cables, a driver CD, and a bracketed serial port. Nothing too flashy, but everything you need to get the machine up and running.

Once you boot the machine and get into the BIOS, you'll notice that the TK7X Pro has the same spartan BIOS as its predecessors. There aren't too many options available for "tweaking", but considering the target market for this board, that's no big deal.

Layout

As for the board's layout... It is very similar (identical?) to the Tk7 and TK7X except for the missing PCI slot. On a board this jammed full of features, Tyan had to sacrifice a PCI slot to accomodate the logic controllers and GoC NIC. With onboard everything, the loss of one PCI slot shouldn't be a big deal, but it's worth a mention.

The only real issue I have with the TK7X Pro's layout is the placement of the 24pin power connector. I complained about it on the TK7 and the TK7X and TK7X Pro both use the same location. In a big rackmount or tower case it is not an issue at all as most EPS12V PSUs have adequate wire length to creatively route around the CPUs and memory slots. In a small rackmount case though, this could be a problem.

What We Tested

I'm not going to blow a bunch of sunshine up your skirt and waste time with seven pages of benchmarks in this review. There are only so many ways that I can say that 2200+ MPs perform the same on the TK7X Pro as they do on EVERY other MPX based motherboard. For this review, I stuck with the core synthetic benches just to make sure that everything was kosher. The systems were as follows:

Both BIOS' were set to "Optimized Defaults" for all tests.

Sandra 2003 >>