Tyan Trinity KT-A (S2390B)
Board Revision: ?
BIOS Version: January 8, 2001
Tyan also sent us their actual Athlon motherboard based on the VIA KT133A chipset. It is called S2390B (or Trinity KT-A) and comes with six PCI slots, one ISA, one AGP 4x, three DIMM sockets for up to 1.5 GB of PC133 SDRAM (no ECC), two UltraATA/100 IDE controllers and an AC97 sound system with three line-ins. Even a piezo speaker has been placed on the motherboard.
The CPU socket is surrounded by several huge capacitors. Only two fan headers are available in order to attach additional fans - that's quite unusual for Tyan, as other models come with three or even four headers.
Tyan and IWill are the only two manufacturers out of the 12 boards which give you the option to boot from several USB devices like USB floppy, hard drive or CDROM.
Overclockers can switch to alternative FSB speeds between 133 and 150 MHz. Just the option to increase the CPU core voltage is missing. In my opinion the lack of even faster clock selection (up to 166 MHz) is no disadvantage, as such high clock rates usually do not run reliable any more.
Once again Tyan provided a stable motherboard with lots of hardware features. The overclocking capabilities can be seen as some kind of addendum, but are certainly far away from the level that Asus, AOpen and IWill have reached.
However, people who go for a Tyan motherboard usually do not pay to much attention to overclocking features or hardware extras. They are out for a reliable motherboard with good performance - that's what you will get from the Trinity KT-A.
