Friday, July 27, 2001

Introduction

Today we'll be reviewing the Tyan S2390B Trinity KT-A motherboard - a small pleasure for us, since we haven't received any new Tyan boards in quite a while. As you can probably tell from the title the KT-A is a Socket A board based around the VIA KT133A chipset. Tyan's boards have always carried the tradition of being well designed, and usually manage to incorporate a few new high-tech gizmos capable of inspiring even the most jaded propellor-head. One aspect of the Trininty KT-A that immediately stood-out for us, was that it actually includes an ISA slot - a standard that has been summarily abandoned by most other manufacturers.

With all that being said then, let's say we take a closer look.

Configuration

The Tyan S2390B Trinity KT-A reflects Tyan's long-standing design philosophies, and incorporates only a few Overclocking features - and these are usually distilled into their simplest forms.

The board includes two jumpers - JP19 and JP26 - which can be used to force the FSB of a 66MHz FSB CPU to 100MHz, or that of a 100MHz FSB CPU to 133MHz. No other jumpers are present.

Unfortunately, there are no options allowing for the adjustment of the Vcore or Vio voltages.

No options are provided for changing the clock multiplier setting neither.

In fact, only a single option relating to the FSB is present in the BIOS, and can be found in the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu.

That said, the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu does provide users with the ability to change memory settings, including latency, bus frequency - which can be set to 100MHz or 133MHz, and a number of other functions which are normally supported by the KT133A chipset.

Next: Technical details.