Friday, July 09, 1999

The performances test results

All tests were performed under Win98.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: Tyan Trinity S1598 with 1Mb of L2 cache
CPU: AMD K6-2 3Dnow 400Mhz
Memory: 64mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: Kenwood 40X True X CDROM drive
AGP port: STB VElocity 4400 TNT 16Mb SDRAM AGP
OS: Win98 built 4.10
DirectX 6.1

Winbench 99 CPUmark

The Winbench 99 CPUmark benchmark results are showing that the Tyan Trinity S1598 Super 7 motherboard is not reaching very high performance on this test by being beaten by 4 out of the 5 motherboards tested here.

Winstone 99

Doing much better this time, the Tyan Trinity S1598 is hoisting among the pack of the bests on this test.

Overclocking

Surprisingly, the Trinity S1598 Overclocked performances are not much better that the performances it obtain under the normal operating conditions.

Video sub-system tests

Using the normal operating condition of the processor, the Tyan Trinity S1598 reached the third rank juts behind the Gigabyte GA-5AX revision 4. The Overclocking results of the Trinity S1598 with the K6 -2 cranked at 450Mhz (100Mhz and a 4.5X multiplier) gave much better results by portioning this motherboard second among the best score measured. Unfortunately, due to the lack of clock frequency available on this motherboard, it has been impossible to conduct a test by using a 112Mhz clock frequency.

Hard disk drives sub-system tests

One of the weakness of the Trinity S1598 seems to be its hard disk drives sub-system. As a fact, much better performances have been observed on several other similar motherboards on this same benchmark. Unfortunately, at the time I was testing this board the ATA66 hard disk drive I was using revealed to be defective and I just couldn't tests the ATA66 mode of this motherboard.

The below evaluation table is showing the strong points and the weak points of the tested motherboard. No need to remember to you that we never buy a motherboard only for its performances. Most of today's motherboards are exhibiting performances very close to each others, so, we need additional information in order to help us distinguish what are the real advantages of a motherboard compared to the others and this is exactly where is coming into help this evaluation table.

This motherboard obtained a score of 86 points on a possibility of 100. The Tyan Trinity S1598 Super 7 motherboard is rather deceiving here as I was expecting a much better score for this motherboard. All these lost points are coming from a series of small weakness explained in the weak points down below.

The weak points

Here are the weak points of this motherboard: First of all, the layout of this motherboard is far from being ideal. For instance, the processor socket is very badly placed. By being situated in the upper right corner of the motherboard it is not receiving the air flow from the power supply fan. To continue with the poor placement of the components, the processor jumpers to set the multiplier and clock frequency are located at the upper right edge of the motherboard and once all the cables are plugged on the motherboard, these jumpers becomes pretty unpleasant to reach. Some points have also been lost on the Overclockability because of the way too much limited choice of clock frequencies. Finally a richer software bundle, a function in the BIOS menu to give access to additional clock frequencies, a more detailed users manual, would all have given some additional points to this motherboard.

The strong points

The strong points of the Tyan Trinity S1598 motherboard are: its good overall performances and its excellent expansion possibilities.

Conclusions

If you're looking for a super Overclockable motherboard then the Tyan Trinity S1598 might not be what your looking for. However, this motherboard has plenty of interesting features and its relatively good performances combined to its excellent expansion possibilities are making out of it a sure value fo those looking something else than the Overclockability of a motherboard...

For any additionnal information, please visit Tyan's web site.