Tyan S1837UANG Thunderbolt GX Dual Slot-1

The Bad

The first problem with the Thunderbolt is its tremendous size, if a motherboard requires a full sized ATX case to simply achieve a snug fit, then you know that the motherboard is a tad large.  This is the case with the Tyan Thunderbolt, don't expect to cram this puppy into anything smaller than a roomy ATX case.  The board is about the size of two smaller BX boards put together. 

Because of the slight rearrangement of PCI slots, and the large heatsink on the GX chipset, and in order to prevent defining a new layout specification, Tyan was forced to squeeze the distance between the two slot-1 CPU interfaces.  While this is better for stability (shorter traces between the two slots, less length for the signal to travel within), it is worse for cooling, as the distance between the two slots measures under 2".  This means that you can't use any monster heatsink/fan combos on your processors.  The slots are designed for operation with retail Intel heatsink/fan combos, and nothing else, so make sure that you get an extremely low profile heatsink/fan combo if you plan on pursuing the Thunderbolt, otherwise you're going to be a very unhappy high-end user the minute you pull the board out of its box; and you know what happens when high-end users grow unhappy, they start using their programming skills for evil, and we don't want that happening now do we? ;)

The third and final complaint AnandTech found with Tyan's otherwise excellent flagship is its hefty cost.  All of the features, improvements, stability, and quality come at a cost less than that of a Pentium III 450, ABIT BX6, and 64MB of RAM.  The estimated price on the Tyan S1837UANG, upon its release, is a whopping $849.  So you better start pawning your watches and wedding rings, and you'd better hold off on that Voodoo3 purchase, because the Thunderbolt will set you back quite a bit. 

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 256MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM DIMM (for compatibility testing only)

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.mushkin.com