Power, overclocking, RAID and Setup

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

One of the big concerns with the Thunder K7 besides the cost was the requirement of a new, non-backwards compatible power supply. The P4 style PSU that was required was only made by two manufacturers on launch and they were expensive and difficult to find. The new Tiger MP motherboard uses a standard ATX power connector and does not require the additional 8-pin cable.

However, the power needed to push two Athlon MP processors and the other system components forced Tyan to include a note with the board to use a minimum of 300 watts power supply. Of course, if you have 4 hard drives and 10 fans, you will probably be safer with a 400W or above PSU. If you don’t have the power supply you think you will need, I recommend the Enermax Whisper 465watt power supply that you can get at Plycon.

As before with the Thunder K7, overclocking options on the Tyan Tiger MP are pretty much non-existent. The jumpers that set the FSB on the board do indicate a single reserved position, so we can only guess what those might one day do, but the Tiger MP is still a far cry from an overclocker’s dream motherboard. One option that I am working on now, with the help of the guys at Plycon again, is testing out some of the Golden Sockets with the Tiger MP motherboard. They allow you to change the multiplier on the CPU without modifying the L1 bridges and without the necessary bios or jumper options on the motherboard. You will hear more on that from me at a later time.

Tyan Tiger MP (2460) AMD-760 MP Motherboard Review - Motherboards 32

Now, some of you are surely wondering about the RAID in the title up there. 🙂 Well, let me tell you why I included it. I can’t be sure, and I haven’t received any response from Tyan on the subject, but if you notice there is a PCB layout option for a chip that was not included. By eyeing it, it seems to be the same size as an AMI IDE RAID controller. Also, there are two additional PCB ‘placemats’ for connectors above the current IDE channel connectors. Was or is Tyan planning on releasing an IDE RAID version of the Tiger MP? Again, this is only my theory for now, until I get more information back from Tyan on it.

For the system setup on the Tiger MP, I decided to use the standard components for the rest of the motherboard I tested. It’s nice to see that in most of the tests I used, the hard drive performance differences from the Cheetah SCSI to the Western Digital IDE were negligible. Of course, I didn’t run any HDD-specific tests, either. Anyway, here is the setup and benchmarks used:

Test System Setup
CPU 2 x 1.2 GHz AMD Athlon MP Processor
Memory 1 x 256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE
Video Card Visiontek GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 12.90
Operating System Windows 2000

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
SiSoft Sandra Multimedia Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark
Linux Compilation
CliBench
CineBench
Photoshop 6.0.1
Passmark

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