Tyan Tomcat i7230A S5160

Performance:

Without stock overclocking abilities on the Tyan Tomcat i7230A motherboard, our testing comparison motherboards was the Abit AW8 (i955X) and Tyan Tomcat i7221A (E7221). We were forced to utilize alternative hardware for the Copper River motherboard, due to the lack of PCI Express support, Pentium D support, and DDR2. Throughout the i7230A and AW8 testing, we used the configuration listed below.

To compare the Copper River and Mukilteo, the same Intel Pentium 4 530 was used as well as Western Digital 160GB SATA drive and other components, however, in replace of the X800XL was a PCI based NVIDIA GeForce FX5200 128MB and the system memory used was 2 x 512MB of OCZ PC-3200 DDR-400. With the Tyan E7221 testing, the same software versions and package selection was called into action. In addition to the Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) CPU used with all of the motherboards, we also used an Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) for additional dual-core testing upon the E7230 Chipset. Normally, we would also perform additional tests with the integrated video, however, the present status of XGI Technology's Linux display drivers for the 2.6 kernel are quite rudimentary and have proved to be less than favorable in the 3D intensive environments. As far as the Linux compatibility goes with the Tyan Tomcat i7230A S5160, we had experienced no issues with any of the onboard components. Red Hat's Kudzu had properly detected and configured all of the enabled components, with the only area not operating favorably being the LM_Sensors detection for the hardware monitoring. For benchmarking these various motherboard configurations, our usual platter of Linux tests were called in, which consist of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, SPECViewPerf, HDparm, diskWriggler, Gzip Compression, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench.