Review of Slot One Boards with 440FX Chipset

Tyan S1682

This board, called 'Tahoe' was a moody fellow and took me about ten times the time for testing than the three above boards. The first sample I received was running far from stable and took my NT as well as my Win95 test configurations several times with it in its death. The Award BIOS it came with wasn't exactly improving this behavior. So the next thing I received was a new AMI BIOS, which still couldn't cure the problems. Eventually I got a complete new board and what a surprise, it was working flawlessly at last!!!

The S1682 is something quite special, since its the first dual Pentium II board I've seen. The performance of it is equal to the performance of the AOpen AX6F and hence No.1 under Windows NT. Under Windows 95 it's not quite as fast, but still fairly close to the leader as well. It is very well equipped, coming with the decent amount of 8 SIMM sockets and even from far you can see that this board is packed with tantalum capacitors. This shows that unless Asus or AOpen, Tyan is not trying to save production cost with cheaper board components, and as far as I was told, this board is priced very aggressively, although it's a dual board.

Hence for me the Tyan S1682 is the most interesting Slot One board that's currently available. Fast, good quality and even expandable to a dual CPU system for a really attractive price. I only wished I wouldn't have had so much trouble with the pre-production sample I received first.

This Intel 440FX chipset board is in ATX form factor and comes with 5 PCI, 3 ISA, 8 SIMM slots, cacheable area is as in all other Pentium II or Pentium Pro carrying boards 1 GB, it supports ECC, no Ultra-DMA and comes with a switching voltage regulator (standard in PPro/PII boards)