Tyan Motherboards and memory

[labrador]

Just had an Asus P2B die on me. Local shop stocked Tyan boards so I decided on that quickly. I didn't know that Tyan recommends only certain brands of memory before buying the board. Now I see the system is unstable - can run something for only 2 minutes before it freezes.

Tried swapping all the DIMMs I have (all generic PC100) and also the CPU with a known
stable one, but no luck.

Anyone else have experiences like this with Tyan MB? Did a brand name memory like Kingston solve the problem?

[aaroncgi]

Which Tyan MB do you have? I was rather unsure about this particular aspect of the Tyan boards myself. Every single review I read or person I talked to about the Tyan boards remarked at how very stable they were, and to me stability includes memory. The boards I was looking at had a rather microscopic list of modules that had been tested and 'approved' for my board. However, vendors were telling me another story, that just about any good quality memory should work in the boards, and reviews confirmed this (though they usually use the highest quality stuff anyhow, as they have way more money than I do).

I've got a Tyan S2380 Trinity K7, and have had just one problem with a stick of PC133 128MB Nanya memory. I'd never heard of Nanya, according to the place I bought it, this was 'major brand'. Well, it works like a champ at 100 Mhz, but if I set the memory clock to Host clock +33, I get lockups in 3D applications after a random amount of time, but usually less than half an hour. So, I just run at at Host CLK.

I've read somewhere that running the FSB clock and memory bus clock asychronously can actually make things slower, though most reviews have reported the opposite, but in no case have I seen the speed difference to be dramatic. Anyhow...

Sorry to ramble on! It was my understanding that the older Tyan MBs (Super 7 and Pro 133A, or older, BX etc..) were LESS picky about memory than the Athlon boards, but I could be wrong on that...

Aaron

S2380 Trinity K7 KX133 v. 1.02
Athlon 650
Nanya PC133 128MB
Matrox G400 32MB DH
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB
Kenwood 42X
Yamaha DS-XG PCI
Zoom 56K PCI
Samsung Syncmaster 950P
Daewoo CMC-1501BA

[labrador]

Other systems using same RAM on Asus MBs have stayed up for weeks and run intensive 3D games (Fly!, Unreal etc.) without incident. But with this Tyan board, I'll be lucky to be able to see 2 websites or launch Eudora and view mail before it locks up. Most of the memory has Hyundai DRAMs. I notice the place I bought most of my memory now has Infineon DRAM based generic memory and also carry Kingston for a few bucks more. Maybe they have had problems from other customers.

The board in question is Tyan S1854 (Trinity 400). The one telltale sign is in the manual. It documents the beep codes on POST as having only one for video (1 long, 2 short). It then says any other beeps likely mean memory problems. I get one beep as usual during power up, and then another short one after the components, IRQs, etc. are all listed. So I'm going to try brand name memory unless I learn of some CMOS setting to work around it. I've already tried various memory timing - even running at 66MHZ doesn't help this generic PC100.

[EchoWars]

Yes, the 1854 is picky about memory. but I wouldn't exactly call Kingston 'name-brand'. BTW, have built upwards of 20 systems with the 1854 MB. All are running with Mushkin memory and having no problems. www.mushkin.com

[labrador]

Well, Kingston is more of a name brand than no name brand! I don't really know much about the qualities of various brands. Up to now I have not had to. I mentioned Kingston because Tyan's manual does and one store I've used carries it.

Thanks for the tip on Mushkin. I'm checking it out. The only trouble there is that Mushkin sells everything from "Budget PC133" to "High Performance REV2 PC133 222". What between these two extremes worked for you?

The place that sold me the MB builds a lot of systems based on this Tyan model so I'll try there first to see what he uses that is most affordable.

[EchoWars]

The Mostel Rev. 1.5 is just fine in the Tyan...the Rev 2 is better for o'clocking, but my memory runs in-spec, so I don't sweat the overclocking deal a lot. The rev 1.5 stuff runs with ALL the timings cranked and CAS2. BTW, the most useful and almost the fastest BIOS for the 1854 is the latest (1.07). 1.00 was a tiny-bit faster in memory transfers, but 1.07 has more features and is more stable with vid cards....

[Seaspray]

Hi,

To Echowars and others who know this m/b really well, can you help me?

I am running a Tyan s1854, BIOS rev 1.06. I haven't had any problems with the memory (generic PC133) as far as I know, I think most of my crashes are due to my vid card (sorry matrox!!).

I do have a couple of questions though. Do you know anywhere I can find out what all the BIOS settings mean for this m/b?

E.g. Should 'processor number feature' be enabled? What memory settings should I use? Turbo/fast/normal/10ns/8ns? Any other tips on setting this m/b up for optimum performance and reliability?

Thanks

------------------
P111 667 (133x5), Tyan S1854 Trinity 400, 128Mb PC133, G400 MAX

[EchoWars]

I could type all night, but the easiest thing to do is to point you to http://www.homeweb.org.uk/s1854/

Good info there.

BTW, BIOS 1.06 sucks. Go to 1.07.

[Seaspray]

Thanks for the link.

Sounds like I am going to have to be very brave and flash my BIOS. Maybe get some better quality RAM as well.

I may be gone some time...

------------------
P111 667 (133x5), Tyan S1854 Trinity 400, 128Mb PC133, G400 MAX

[labrador]

Personally, I decided the Tyan MB was a bad match for my G200. I found it liked a G400 from another system, and the G200 ran well in the other system (Asus motherboard having BX chipset). But the G200 in the Tyan MB with ApolloPRO chipset was a mess. All IRQs for cards were assigned to 11, and there was no way in Windows ME nor CMOS to reassign the IRQs. This seemed to be the cause of very frequent lockups I experienced (sometimes before I even got as far as the Windows Start button).

I've decided "good riddance" to the Tyan S1854. My replacement is a used Supermicro with BX chipset, with support for dual processors. It doesn't require any special needs in memory, video, and so on.

[DRED]

Try setting you agp driving value to auto it made is so I could get the g200 working with the trinity 400. The g400 did not have this problem.

[Nick L]

Lab - Ive got the 1590s and 1598s
Ive put many generic sdram's in these mb's (as I upgrade with new-found cash) and find both mb's to be rock stable.
Ive got g400 max in 1598 w/k63-450 192mb and g200 in 1590s w/k62-350 128mb.

Your irq prb. is "probably" because you didnt install via's drivers after win install

[EchoWars]

Nick..

The SS7 motherboards you speak of are not picky about memory...Labrador was asking about the Trinity 400, which is a whole different animal. It is very picky about the memory it accepts, IME.

[labrador]

Actually the VIA drivers were installed by Windows ME at first via PnP. They were fairly recent drivers from June 2000. After that I installed the latest VIA 4 in 1 driver (4.24) and Matrox's 4.51 driver mentioned on the Tyan website as compatible with the G200. Matrox support suggested upgrading to 6.04 drivers for ME, and I also tried that. I also did a reinstall of Windows (from scratch) to be sure that VIA drivers were updated prior to installing Matrox drivers. I noticed that the system would even freeze while still running a Standard VGA driver. These freezes occured simply as I tried to use Windows to install the driver updates or Matrox drivers. Sometimes I couldn't get further than simply clicking the Start button after a reboot!

Anyway, the same hardware is happy running in the Supermicro motherboard with BX. It has been stable for a few days now. I'm going to buy a used P2B to have as back up so I won't have to face the VIA madness again.

I'm certainly going to make sure that any future motherboards I buy have the ability to map IRQs to PCI slots. The Tyan Trinity 400 didn't, unlike the Asus P2B/P3B, and this was part of the downfall.

One particularly unnerving aspect is that this problem was given a wide spectrum troubleshooting by Matrox and nothing could help. The forum was littered with others having the same problem with VIA chipsets and Matrox products (usually G200), and the support responses were the same, and no one was getting anywhere. As the problem even occurred in Standard VGA, it looks like a hardware problem to me.