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Ultima PC: Issue 1 (Page 4/14)

Posted: July 29, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

The Motherboard [ Tyan Thunder 2400 (S2257) Motherboard: $ 624.00 ]

Dual Intel Slot1
Intel Pentium® II/III 350 to 8xx MHz
Two on-board VRMs (VRM 8.4 spec)
Front Side Bus support for 100/133 MHz

System Memory
Four 3.3V unbuffered / Registered PC133 DIMM sockets
Maximum memory - 4GB
Two MRH-S Chips on board

Integrated PCI IDE
Two 40-pin IDE connectors for up to 4 drives
PIO Mode 3 / 4, UltraDMA 33 / 66 supported
ATAPI IDE CD-ROM and LS-120 supported

Integrated Audio
st840 (ICH) Audio Link
AC'97 Codec rev. 2.1
Line-in, Line-out, Mic ports
4-pin CD-ROM audio header (ATAPI)
4-pin Video audio header (ATAPI)

Integrated LAN controller
Intel 82559 LAN controller
10/100Mbps data transfer rate
3-pin Wake on LAN
Alert on LAN II support (optional)

Chipset
Intel 840 AGPset - MCH+ICH+FWH (4Mb)
Intel P64H to support 64-bit slots
National PC87 366 LPC Super I/O chip

Expansion Slots
One 2x /4x /Pro AGP slot
Four 32-bit PCI 2.1 slotsT
wo 64-bit/ 66 MHz slots
*Total seven usable slots

Integrated I/O
One Floppy connector
Two 9-pin 16550 UART Serial ports
One 25-pin ECP / EPP Parallel port
One IR TX / RX header - shares port with COM2
Two USB rev 1.2 ports
PS/2 Mouse & Keyboard ports

Integrated SCSI (optional)
Dual Channel Ultra2 or Ultra3 LVD SCSI support
Symbios 896 or /1010, up to 15 devices
Channel A: 68-pin connector
Channel B: 50-pin and 68-pin connectors Other Features
National hardware monitoring chip
Six 3-pin Fan monitoring headers
One 2-pin Chassis Intrusion header
Temperature and voltage monitoring
Dual 20-pin ATX power connector

* S2257 board supports both 3.3V and 5.0V add-on cards; however, the 64-bit PCI slot is based on 5.0V connector spec. so make sure 3.3V add-on cards are "universal" - can plug into either 3.3V or 5.0V connectors.

This board contains features that really make it the ultimate board. First off, it’s an SMP capable board supporting processors all the way up to 1GHz. Second of all; the dual power supply connectors allow redundant power supply mayhem. Other important features include onboard dual channel Ultra2 LVD SCSI for the ultimate in SCSI connectivity and expandability. Also included in the mix are 2 64-bit PCI slots! Perfect for our RAID SCSI adapter. Notice the inclusion of a 4X AGPPro slot? This slot will allow the use of graphic adapters such as the 3dfx V5 6000 without using power supply connectors.

Do you need LAN connectivity? Well, an onboard Intel 100Mbit controller will provide you with all your networking needs at full speed. Other important features include support for up to 4GB of system RAM. That’s right folks, four gigabytes of RAM. Finally, no more hard drive swapping. We expect nothing less from the ultimate PC.

Other minor features include onboard sound, which you can disable. Who would want onboard sound anyway? Having on board SCSI and LAN already saves us PCI slots. Count them boys and girls, six full length PCI slots and zero ISA slots. Finally, a motherboard that truly complies with the PC2000 spec.