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Tiger MP Dual-Processor Motherboard
CtrlPhreak writes: "Anandtech has posted a review of an affordable AMD 760 based motherboard, the Tyan Tiger MP. It's basically the Tyan Thunder K7 without all the integration. For $220, it's a great deal. It has the exact same performance as the Thunder, and it is tested to run fine with those cheap and fast 1ghz durons. They say Tyan is putting out this board to compete with other offerings of a cheap 760 platform, we can only hope."
The Tiger MP is a sweet mobo. However, AMD will be coming out with a new MP chipset called the 760MPX. The MPX has two distinct improvements. First, registered DDR RAM will not be necessary. Any old DDR RAM will do. Secondly, the MPX will support 66Mhz 64-bit PCI slots.
We have photographs of the new Asus and MSI 760MPX mobos.
One is quite enough to heat up my appartment during the coldest winter nights. That motherboard is for someone with a big house or something.
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Nice thing about this board in comparison with Tyan's other AMD MP offerings is the fact that you can use a standard ATX power supply. Tyan's previous boards required that you purchase a proprietary 450W power supply. They recommend at least 300W, though. I'm running one of these right now with a single 1.2 Palomino on the 300W PS that came with my In-Win Q500N with no problems as of yet. While it can handle a standard power supply now, Tyan still recommends that you use Registered PC2100 RAM for it. I was able to find 256M for around $50 or so.
I recommend Einux Systems if you are looking for a place to purchase a motherboard processor combo for this board.
Before this board came out I was going to go for a dual PIII 1Ghz system, but since that type of processor is always going to stay at 1Ghz, I figured it was worth the extra money to be able to upgrade this board to wherever the Palomino chipset ends up (from what I've heard it the chipset should be able to scale up to 2Ghz or so).
There are supposed to be other boards released by Abit, MSI, etc. in the next month or two that will be even cheaper, but if you are like me and couldn't wait (and aren't planning on overclocking your system) then this board is a good choice.
I ordered one of these a few weeks ago, and unfortunately it arrived "Dead On Arrival".
I've been talking to a lot of other 2460 owners, and everyone is impressed, but everyone agrees that it can also be a very picky board.
There's been many reports of memory related problems, specifically with some brands of memory. The consensus so far is that Corsair memory has been the most reliable.
Once it's up an running though, there's been nothing but raving reviews.
MadCow... anxiously awaiting my replacement mobo...
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256Mb dimms are only $7.00 dollars more than their unregistered brethern. Checking crucial's site confirmed the cost really is not an issue
This looks the motherboard I was waiting for, as I don't need all the bells the previous offering had, let alone the price tag.
Granted a 64bit/66mhz bus chipset is coming out, but for those to whom this board appeals to most likely won't need the 66mhz PCI.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I've used AMD processors and would've bought AMD when I upgraded my machine 5 mos ago if the SMP capabilities were there but I'm not so certain now after the Tom's Hardware review. In the review (posted on /.) it demonstrated heatsinks being removed from the CPU while in operation. Both the PIII & PIV survived but the Athlons fried up with one taking the motherboard with it.
I think we all use Linux for it's across the board stability so why not apply those high expectations to the hardware we put in those boxes? I for one think that I may not be purchasing AMD until they address the fact that the heat monitoring system that works for a fan-failure should also work for aa heatsink begin dislodged. Else you may find yourself out the $$ for a processor as well as the cost of your kick-ass Tyan mobo.
"...and generally behaved in a manner one can only describe as despicable." - February 27 2001, Michael Sims
I have the Thunder K7 and I haven't had one problem with stability yet. I haven't had a problem in over a month so far, running Windows 2000. I'm running 2x Athlon MP @ 1.2GHz. I'm really happy with this machine. It really heats up the room, though. I have 5 extra case fans and the ones in the back blow out very hot air. That's the only downside to it so far.
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Note that the Tiger MP has problems with larger heatsinks due to the layout of the PCB. Check the Anandtech article for more info.
One other problem that the Anandtech article didn't mention is that the board does not have the four mounting holes around the processor sockets (like the P4s all have, and many AMD have). So forget about the latest Swiftech and Alpha heatsinks which require those holes.
Perhaps Tyan decided to omit the holes because there wasn't room anyways... the heatsinks that mount via screws tend to be bigger and may not have fit properly anyways. At the same time, I do like the mounting holes as I feel a lot safer when my heatsink is screwed onto the motherboard -- I don't want it popping off and allowing my processor to burn itself up.
Of course having two CPUs isn't as important as having 384 or 512 gigs of RAM, but it's a valid concern for the average home user...
See, these days, the average home user wants to run Nautilus and Netscape simultaneously in Enlightenment on top of GNOME with antialiased screen fonts and alpha-rendered transparent xterms, while he (or she) watches Antitrust on DVD in a window (if LiViD worked) and works in Photoshop running on VMWare.
This is what the average home user wants these days, and so the average home user is building his (or her) own PC because Dell and Gateway just aren't offering it.
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NOt only did you get the dual athlons, you got dual 3com NICs, Adaptec 7899W dual channel Ultra160 SCSI controller (dual channel!), onboard ATI RageXL graphics. Add all that up as seperate components, and the board doesn't look that expensive. Espically when you have all that hardware and still have 5 ? 64-bit/33MHz PCI slots (backwards compatible with 32-bit/33MHz PCI devices).
:)
Overall, the board is competitive to server board offerings from Intel. I haven't been overly impressed with the onboard 3com nics however. Installing linux can be a chore as they don't always work except on the latest 2.2 kernels. The drivers included in Windows 2000 for these cards have a few bugs in them as well. In both cases it's fixable by driver/kernel updates, but could present an issue during installation.
And the problems I've had with the onboard 3com's have been on Dell motherboards anyway.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
The Palomino chipset has some MP optimizations, and is officially supported by AMD for MP use. The older processors will work, but don't perform as well in the benchmarks I've seen. The Anandtech review states that they were able to use the old Athlon chipset in this board too. I'm thinking that when they built their old chip they allowed SMP, but they didn't optimize for it (or perhaps there were other issues with the chip that we don't know about) and so they released a new chipset once the MP boards were ready that was optimized for it.
So, yeah, you can use the old Athlons in your Tyan 2460, but if you really want the performance, you'll want to go with their Palomino core. As a added benefit, the Palomino is supposed to run cooler too.
On a related note, I recently read of servers equiped with Transmeta Crusoes having no fans. While I am sure the performance of the Crusoe is not as great as Athlons, it is a trade-off to consider imo. Here is a bit from a recent press release of the Crusoes:
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
The board has four DDR slots, you can only use two of them if you want to use unregistered DDR.
Here's a blatant rip from the review:
"As long as only two slots were filled, the stability was identical and the performance was roughly the same (the unregistered modules are theoretically faster but that doesn't translate into any tangible performance gains). When more than three unregistered DIMMs were installed the system would not POST; and adding a third registered DIMM to a set of two unregistered DIMMs would not boot either."
Reading the article closely before you post is a good thing.
Factor in the free 2nd-day shipping and it looks like Crucial is still cheaper overall.
(No, I don't work for Crucial or Micron...but I've bought from them on more than one occasion and don't see myself buying memory from other vendors anytime in the near future.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
However I tried to triple boot with Windows 98 so I can use a cheap video grabber card--my advice is DON'T EVEN TRY to install Win98 on this board. Mine installed fine but would not boot Win98.
Placing the heatsink/fans on the CPUs was kind of tricky. I had 2mm of clearance between my heatsink/fan of choice and the single row of capacitors on the board. If the caps didn't wiggle I wouldn't have been able to install the heatsink/fans.
I found humor on the inside cover of the manual. I was pleased to see in print that this motherboard is certified for *both* Win2k and RH 7.1. However that textual note was marked with an asterisk to the effect:
Hello Tyan! I believe Microsoft will stop meaningful support of Win2k long before that RH would stop meaningful support of RH 7.1. More info about that assertion here, here and here.Also, a warning. If you choose to install 1 Gb or so of ECC, registered memory, then booting takes a long time. There's some kind of POST that occurs for this kind of memory that delays my boot by like 30 seconds.
Finally, I just want to say that SMP is no magic bullet. For my purposes this board is fabulous. But in fact, some applications run more slowly on a dual CPU system. For example, any given single threaded program (read: first person shooter) will take a hit, say 2-5% of its speed. Your application has to use multiple threads to take advantage of this environment. Of course you can run more processes, that's nice.
You can judge for yourself if this is a good board for you. Look at the reviews for the Tyan Thunder K7, I feel they apply to the Tiger when it comes to processor performance. You can find review for that board here and here
Oh yeah, and it's set to something reasonable my default. You actually have to disable that if you want to fry your processor.
Next time you're going to whine, whine about something legitimate.