Been looking at a mobo manufactured by Tyan. What kind of reputation do Tyan have in the motherboard world? Are they generally good for overclocking ?
Tyan motherboards are rock solid and designed in my neck of the woods -- southern California, USA. They are somewhat costly as they are intended for use in high-end workstations and servers. For this reason they lack overclocking features. After all, why would they include such features on a motherboard designed foremost for stability?
They're not all SMP boards, but they are all well-built and well-tested. That being said my home file server is built on a dual-AMD Tyan mobo, and it's great.
If you want a dual processor motherboard to overclock, then look at Iwill or Asus. Tyan and SuperMicro really aren't companies you look to if you want to overclock. That doesn't mean there aren't any options that can allow for some overclocking, but as a general rule, Tyan and SuperMicro don't cater to the enthusiast, so don't look for enthusiast options.
Thanks for the tip As you might have read in my others posts, my ECS motherboard's AGP slot died and because of it's age, i'm looking for a replacement. Unfortunately, the ECS wasn't strong enough to withstand constant fiddling with various bits! By the sounds of it, a Tyan motherboard can cope with me pulling out the odd PCI card everyday and tinkering with this and that! I've won a Tyan Tiger 133 Dual Slot 1 Motherboard on ebay (hence another post of mine asking about dual processors)! I'm gonna use it with twin P3 700 MHz CPUs and of course, my trusty Geforce 2 MX 400! This should give me enough power and reliability don't ya think?
Depends on what you're doing. As a gaming rig, no (but why would you get an SMP rig for gaming in the first place?), but as a starter dual processor workstation, yeah. ECS boards are pretty good, but they have had problems in the past. Their DV6AA (or is it the D6VAA--can't remember) was a very popular dual P3 board, and seems to work very well...which shocked a lot of people who blindly said ECS sucks without ever running one.
It's just a test setup, for installing and uninstalling hardware/software etc. To be honest, the only performance item I need is a good reliable hard drive. I'm constantly installing and reinstalling operating systems and software. I've got a reliable 20GB 5400RPM Maxtor (Master) and a Western Digital WD200 20GB 7200RPM (Slave) drive [ot] I've read quite a few bad reviews about the WD200. One reviewer said only 6 months from buying it new, it failed. He later discovered the reason it failed was because the actuator arm fell off completely and ruined the disk!! Can you believe that? It shattered inside the hard drive! I hope these drives aren't all like that! [/ot] The funny thing is, the only reason I bought the Tyan was because I thought my ECS AGP slot had died. While I was waiting for the Tyan to be delivered, I decided to have another go at getting the AGP slot to work. I did everything you shouldn't do (stick my finger in the slot, rub the slot with a dry tissue) and hey presto, I got it working again! I just needed to use some force when inserting the Geforce card! So, anyone after a motherboard? only joking.
