Tyan Thunder 100 Pro
Tyan’s new mega-board ’Thunder 100 Pro’ offers almost everything the heart of a dual motherboard freak like me could ask for. Onboard dual UW SCSI, onboard 100/10 MBit Intel ethernet and onboard Vibra VX sound don’t leave much to desire and of course this board comes with 4 DIMM sockets as well.
Compatibility testing seemed like a farce to me, since there’s hardly anything you would have to plug onto this board anymore after equipping it with an AGP graphics card and a Voodoo2 3D accelerator. Nevertheless was the Thunder 100 Pro the only board in the test with AMI WinBIOS, that was able running the ISA PnP network card with any IRQ, although it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would put such a cheap card in this precious motherboard. Another feature that I really liked is the ability to enable each single onboard component via a jumper.
The performance of the Tiger 100 was average in the field, which is still pretty remarkable for a dual board. Of course there aren’t any overclocking features supported, something that’s also typical for dual motherboards. The FSB is adjusted automatically between 66 or 100 MHz and if you should indeed want to run your PII 233-333 at 100 MHz FSB you’ll require the ’B21 procedure’.
The only annoying thing i found was the Thunder’s inability of running PC100 SDRAM with Toshiba chips. So far i’ve tested two different vendors, both with the same negative results. Samsung’s PC66 SDRAM runs fine however, so does Kingston and Corsair PC100 memory.
The Thunder 100 Pro was good enough making it into my own system, but I still hope that Tyan will sort out the memory problem.
