VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

Tyan Trinity 510

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Tyan was the most recent to introduce a P4X266 based solution which somewhat confused us when we learned of its shipping date a week after Comdex 2001. To us it would only make sense for Tyan to pursue a 845 or SiS 645 solution but they have been shipping the Trinity 510 for months now.

The Trinity 510 is clearly geared for a much different crowd than most of the boards in this roundup. The presence of 4 DIMM slots and no onboard audio immediately tip you off that this is more of a serious P4X design than most. With high quality memory you can actually populate all four DIMM slots and have the board work perfectly fine as we noticed in our tests. This is a significant improvement over most of the designs in this roundup which would rarely work with all 3 DIMM slots populated. It seems like Tyan's experience with building massively complicated server boards has paid off in the design of the Trinity 510.

Our only complaint about the board is that Tyan chose to use an external thermistor to read the temperature of the CPU rather than relying on the much more accurate internal thermal diode of the Pentium 4. It also would have been nice to have an integrated LAN option on the board.