picked to partner up with.   At that point in time FIC designed the "Fester" reference design, which was used by a good majority of all the first gen Slot A motherboards using the AMD 751- Irongate chip. When the first Slot A motherboards were released the rumor was that they would support SMP operation. AMD made a few statements about the Duron and the Athlon being SMP compatible, but until now have not been able to prove it.

Since those days back in July and August of 1999, AMD has gone from roughly 5% of the market to 20+% of Silicon in machines.  Now with this next step they have a goal of 30%. In today's shaky economy, fiercely competitive price wars, rapidly evolving technology, AMD is in for the fight of its life against industry giant Intel.   AMD recognizes this and is exactly why they are looking to diversify their target markets from more then the mainstream / low end machines.

June 4th 2001 AMD and Tyan announced officially the Tyan Thunder K7 mother board based on the AMD 762MP chipset. This is the new reference platform for AMD, the "Guiness" board as it was called for over a year of testing it went though.  Even though AMD and Tyan never officially "announced" this board/chip set before June 4th 2001, This board was being tested all around the country and world for many many months.  Since this is a platform to be used in a Server/Workstation market, a flawed product is just totally not acceptable.  AMD's future in the server and workstation market depends on releasing a stable, fast, and feature rich product on the first try.

Why Tyan? Simple. Since this is AMD's first chance to play with the big boys in a extremely lucrative, and make/break market, it needed to partner up with a name that stands for Quality, and Stability. Tyan has long been known for its extremely powerful and capable Dual processor mother boars all the way since the Pentium 1 days.
Tyan has a few families of mother boards:

• TomCat - Integrated, all in one Economy solutions
• Trinity - Versatile Economy, Mainstream single CPU Motherboards
• Tiger - SOHO, Economy Dual CPU Motherboards
• Thunder - Industrial, Professional Dual CPU Motherboards

The Tiger and Thunder motherboards are 2 totally different beasts.   The Tiger boards for the most part Lack integrated features like LAN, SCSI, Firewire.  They are strictly just dual CPU boards, but with the lack of additional features, they are very economical for the stability and performance you get.

The Thunder Motherboards are serious business.   These are the corwn jewel to Tyan.  These are highly integrated Dual CPU motherboards with some of the best hardware in the industry onboard. These boards normally sport better chipsets, higher ram limits, more PCI slots, and more kinds of PCI slots.  They may lack tweaking features from the other boards, but they are meant for one thing only - Stability, and Power.

Tyan has dabbled in AMD motherboards for a while with their Trinity family of single cpu Slot A and Socket A motherboards.  None of which really stand out in an already over diluted market of single CPU socket A motherboard.   Since Tyan and AMD have so much resting on the success of the Thunder K7 mother board launch, you have to know that both companies did everything in their power to make sure the product was fully cooked before releasing it. Numerous colleges, companies, and websites received demo preview boards to use and test.  The results?  well lets see.

Well... so now, after that lengthy historical look at how we got here, lets see what we got to show for it.

Well there we have it folks.   The Thunder K7 in all its glory.  This board is clearly a departure from the stripped down "Thank god it even works" type first rollout of a chipset and a technology.  If you think back to the days of the FIC Fester ref board, there were no bells, no whistles, you were lucky to get ATA 66, USB and AGP. That rollout of a totally new technology was a slow ramp up to where we are today with the ATA100, Firewire, RAID all added features. That took a year to get to.  Not so for the Tyan Thunder K7.

This board comes out on its planned release date, on time ( well sorta... it was really anticipated about a year before it actually came out.. but I digress), and with most every bell and whistle ( minus an onboard Nv Quaddro video chip :) you could want.

• Dual 3Com Server Class Ether link 3C920 Nics
• Onboard ATI Rage XL
• Dual Adaptec AIC 7899W Ultra 160 SCSI
• ATA/100 IDE
• AGP Pro5v 4x
• 4 DDR Dimm Slots.

Now the stuff like the DDR may seem small, but its quite a feat.   Most boards have been limited to 3 DDR slots as the technology is still young, and they are JUST now able to get 4 DDR slots with no signal degradation issues.  The fact that was rolled out already on a chipset this new seems amazing.    But then again as the theme of this board is to make a big splash in the SMP market... they had to. 3DDR slots just doesn't cut it on a big machine.  This is no slim down pre-run board, this is the real deal, and Tyan is making it known.

Facts about the Board-

The Tyan Thunder K7 is a picky board.  The selection of CPU's and RAM it will accept is very slim.  This is done for a few reasons, one is that AMD doesn't want to support every DIY guy bitching that his Durons wont run a Enterprise DB fast enough, and also wants to maintain a very high system integrity.

The Specs are this:

CPU's Supported: Athlon MP 1.2Ghz ( currently)
Ram Supported : ( Various MFG's) Registered PC2100 DDR ( 72x ECC optional).

Q: What is Registered Ram? is it just s certified chip or what?
A: NO. It is a different technology all together.  DDR/SDRAM come in Registered, Buffered, and UnBuffered Versions.   These are all ways to allow the Chipset time to process data or expedite the data movement.  The UnBuffered is the fastest, but also is the least "secure".  Registered delays all data transactions by 1 clock cycle. This is in order to let the Data move in a more regulated and stable stream.  It takes a special chipset to handle Buffered or Registered DDR or SDR SDRAM.  While Registered DDR may not be the fastest in burst reads/writes it is the most stable and reliable. This is why most server class boards use this ram technology.  You CANNOT use Buffered, Registered, or UnBuffered in a board/chipset that does not support it. It will NOT work.

The Chipset-

Combined they offer a very robust, and stable system.  AMD's "Super Bypass" memory enhancement is something that arrived on the Irongate chipset in a later batch. This gives AMD a real boost in the memory scores only paralleled by Via's Interleave technology.   Something unique about the north bridge is while it functions at 266Mhz, and runs 2 CPU's and 4 DDR slots, it does NOT need a hsf! No small feat for AMD who is lately getting the reputation Cyrix once had of the "hottest CPU around". ( which is ironic since Via/Cyricx are releasing the C3 and its able to run without a HSF... How times have changed.)

The Other Chipsets-

Now that we got the board chips explained lets look at the rest of it. and get into OC'n on the board