No overclocking potential on the Tomcat, which is a little bit like going from Mach 2 to a total engine flame-out. Tyan clearly believes that buyers needing manual performance choices or overclocking potential will chose one of the company's other mainboards, based on the 440BX chipset.
For Celeron owners however, the Tomcat provides no ability to manually control the system's front side bus speed. Combine this with the fact that Intel fixes their CPUs with certain clock multipliers, and it adds up to barriers that can't be overcome.
Tyan has produced an i810 mainboard that offers strong stability as well as the addition of a much-needed fourth PCI slot. The audio capacity won't fool anyone into thinking that they're at a John Williams concert, but it does adequately supply a wide range of sound reproduction. The video of the Tomcat, and all i810 mainboards, is limited in 3D apps while being fairly competent in the 2D arena.
Overall we highly recommend the Tomcat if you're motivated solely by price, where this board excels. If you desire an entertainment oriented PC that can produce acceptable frame rates in 3D, then a mainboard based on the Intel 440BX chipset should be your target.
- Integration pays dividends as audio/video are included out of the box.
- Good stability and system level performance.
- Limited amount of SDRAM support
- Poor video accelerator performance
Readers seeking the answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything should be sure to pay a visit to the Sharky Extreme Discussion Board where all the grand questions of the day are debated and discussed at length.
Craig "Mako" Campanaro
Hardware Director
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