The Challenger: Tyan Tiger 133

We already got an early revision of the Tiger 133 a few months ago, but this initial version was still buggy and did not work the way that we would have expected it.

Tyan is now already shipping Rev. F of this board, called S-1834D, which gives quite a pretty good impression now. It's the only one out of the three boards coming with an ISA slot.

Several jumpers are populated on this board. Most of them are used to set the processor speed. Tyan also placed six fan headers on this motherboard in order to ensure sufficient cooling.

Special hardware features are missing: No sound system, no integrated network adapter. Instead of that, Tyan concentrated their work directly on the motherboard. Six PCI slots and four DIMM sockets are maximum. You may even install an AGP graphics card without any need to close the DIMM locks, as the two components are too far apart to interfere with each other.

As expected, the system performance cannot hold up to the Intel OR840, but is still good enough. I did not encounter any stability issues during the tests.

Tyan's BIOS gives you all common options to adjust system devices and performance.