Friday, August 25, 2000

Introduction

After the avalanche of i815, and Via KT-133 motherboards that showed up on out doorstep, it's a bit of a relief to take a step back, and review a good old Slot A board based upon the Via KX-133. As you can guess, the Trinity K7 is designed to work with "classic" AMD Athlon processors. Tyan has always managed to market products that are fast, and well designed, so it's with particular interest that we'll be looking at their slot A offering.

The features

The Trinity K7 is expandable via its 6 PCI slots, 1 ISA slots, single AGP port, and AMR slot. There are also 3 168-pin DIMM sockets available for the installation of up to 768MB of PC100, PC133, or VCM memory.

Clearly, Tyan has left no option unsung by packing the Trinity with nearly every conceivable expansion option. In fact, while nearly every other motherboard manufacturer has chosen to abandon ISA, Tyan has chosen to wisely persevere with the standard.

Configuration of the Trinity K7 is accomplished by setting a series of jumpers. On board we find jumpers JP19, and JP20, which can be used to force the Front Side Bus to operate at frequencies of 180MHz, 200MHz, 240MHz, or 266MHz. While the high values of these settings may seem a bit surprising, one must recall that we're actually dealing with a DDR (Double Data Rate) bus. Thus, the actual FSB values are 90MHz, 100MHz, 120MHz, and 133MHz respectively, with data being sent on the rising & falling edges of each clock cycle. An auto setting is also available, which allows the system to determine the operating frequency of FSB according to the processor installed. Finally, there are jumpers JP25 through JP28, which can be used to alter the setting of the Vcore voltage of the CPU from 1.30v, to 2.05v, in steps of 0.05v.

In short, there are no BIOS functions available for configuring the Trinity K7; all configuration of the CPU must be done through the use jumpers.

Next: Additional features.