Tyan Tiger MP S2460 dual Socket A motherboard

Earlier this year PCW exclusively tested the first dual AMD Athlon system, built with Tyan's Thunder K7 S2462 - the only dual Socket A motherboard on the market.

The Thunder K7 S2462 remains impressive with 64bit PCI slots, onboard dual-Ultra160 SCSI and dual-Lan facilities. On the downside, it requires an exotic WTX power supply and costs around £500 inc VAT.

Realising there's a market for affordable dual AMD systems, Tyan released the Tiger MP S2460 board, which costs a more reasonable £230 inc VAT.

Tyan has produced a cut-down version of the Thunder K7 S2462, without compromising its core appeal. The new Tiger MP S2460 still uses AMD's 760 chipset, consisting of the 762 system controller (northbridge) and 766 peripheral bus controller (southbridge).

The motherboard supports a pair of Athlon MP processors on independent 200 or 266MHz buses (that AMD calls SmartMP), up to 3GB of registered PC1600 or 2100 DDR memory, and a 33MHz PCI bus which can handle both 32bit and 64bit transfers.

There are four PCI slots capable of taking either 64 or 32bit cards, and two PCI slots that are 32bit. Officially, you can only use the slightly more expensive Athlon MP CPUs, as these are the sole chips AMD certifies for dual systems.

Unlike the large Thunder K7 S2462, the new Tiger MP S2460 should fit in most ATX cases. It's not cramped, but a line of capacitors in between the processor sockets may prevent larger heatsinks from being used.

On the upside, Tyan has abandoned the 24pin WTX and additional 8pin power sockets of the Thunder, and fitted the Tiger with a single 20pin ATX power connector. You will need at least a 300W power supply. Since all the board's power comes through this single connector, you shouldn't overload it with especially hungry server RAID or video-editing cards such as Pinnacle's huge Targa 3000. If you want to use this kind of card, then go for the Thunder K7 with its dual power connectors.

Apart from a hefty passive heatsink on the AMD northbridge chipset, that's about it for the surface of the Tiger MP. There are no additional onboard controllers or any facilities for overclocking shenanigans here or in the BIOS. There is space marked out for an additional chip and a pair of EIDE sockets, though, implying a possible RAID version in the future.

The AMD-766 southbridge supplies the standard two EIDE channels supporting up to four UltraDMA33, 66 or 100 drives.

We built a system using a pair of Athlon MP 1800+ processors (running at 1.53GHz each), a single 512MB of PC2100 DDR DIMM, Creative GeForce3 graphics card and a 15.3GB 7,200rpm Seagate Barracuda UltraDMA100 hard disk (formatted with FAT32). Taking no chances we employed an Enermax 431w power supply.

A dual-CPU system requires an operating system that can use both chips, which rules out Windows 9x, Me and XP Home Edition; instead we installed Windows XP Professional and nVidia's latest Detonator XP drivers. The system raced through our 3D Studio Max render in eight minutes three seconds and our Seti work unit in three minutes 41 seconds, while Quake III Arena scored 130.8fps at 1,280 x 1,024 in 32bit. SYSmark 2001 scored an impressive 208 (245 in internet content creation and 175 in office productivity).

These results indicate that office applications run about the same speed as a single-CPU system, but the time taken to do graphics, renders and scientific tasks can literally be halved with two chips on the job.

The Tiger MP S2460 may have little for the tweakers, but we can admit to having it working unofficially with a pair of 1.2GHz Thunderbird Athlons. Potential buyers should also know that Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and Abit all have dual Socket A boards expected soon, and Abit's is bound to be highly tweakable.

For today, though, the Tiger MP S2460 is a triumph. Tyan has carefully removed the expensive aspects of its earlier Thunder K7 and produced an uncompromised board at a price anyone can afford.

Considering it currently has the market to itself, you can't really ask for more.

Price
£229.13 (£195 ex VAT) Athlon MP 1800+: £293.75 each including heatsink & fan (£250 ex VAT)

Contact
Armari: 020 8993 4111 www.armari.com