Tyan: Where are you now?

A quick Q and A with John Nguyen

by Josh Walrath

            I am sure many of you are acquainted with Tyan, but as of late they have been keeping a very low profile.  Their primary market has been supplying high end server boards, which typically have significantly higher margins than desktop mainboards.  They have also been very active in supporting the AMD Opteron, and these mainboards feature anywhere from quad processors to single processor boards (both server and workstation class).  On the Intel side Tyan also has a slew of offerings that cover the bases from quad Xeon’s to single processor workstation class boards.

            While Tyan does have a handful of desktop based products, this has been an area where they have let their marketshare slide.  With the economic downturn of the past 4 years, this is understandable.  It really doesn’t pay to compete with the Asus/MSI/Gigabytes of the world, and achieve very low margins on products aimed at the mass market.  Instead Tyan has concentrated their efforts on the high end, where margins are much more lucrative.  Tyan started to offer high end video cards based on ATI products, but it appeared to be too little, too late.  With competition from Asus, MSI, Sapphire, and others, Tyan couldn’t adequately get their foot in the door, even though their high end products were a step apart from the competitions’ offerings.  From all indications, Tyan’s video card business is dead.  With the recent economic upturn Tyan appears to be gearing up their motherboard products to go more mainstream than they have in the recent past.

            Tyan’s i915G and i925X based Pentium 4 boards appear to be very competitive in terms of features and price with the other market leaders.  Each board has two revisions, each offering something a little different from the other.  For example, one version of the i925X features onboard ATI Rage graphics, so this could easily be turned into an inexpensive 1U or 2U server board.  While Tyan does not have features like MSI’s CoreCell or Abit’s uGuru, it does have some pretty extensive monitoring services that are more server inspired than anything else.

            I had the chance to ask John Nguyen (Tyan’s lone motherboard product manager) a few questions, and he was kind enough to respond to them: 

Josh:  Is the new ATX-12V ver. 2.0 24 pin power supply the same as the EPS-12V?  I know that ATX-12V is supported with your products, but I was wondering if EPS-12V is supported? 

John:  Power supply - You got it, the boards are compatible with EPS12V (common plane). We also support ATX12V, but you'll need to connect the 20-pin, 4-pin, and 4-pin HDD power to get the board to run. We used power connectors for the 24-pin and 8-pin that have offset tabs that allow either the smaller 20-pin to lock into the 24-pin connector, and same with the 4-pin on the 8-pin connector, so system builders can build a system and ship it without worrying about the power connectors coming off. 

Josh:  Will Tyan still provide some overclocking capabilities with these boards?  Or will they be pretty vanilla in that aspect? 

John:  Overclocking - we have CPU ratio modifiers, spread spectrum modifier, and voltage change options... all of which we do not recommend changing (but we didn't lock them). 

Josh:  Will Tyan be producing a new Athlon 64 based desktop class board anytime soon?  What do you think of the nForce 250Gb?  Or will you wait for PCI-E products to hit the Athlon 64 market before going that route? 

John:  We are looking at Athlon 64 -type desktop for upcoming Q3, I'll have more info later on. PCIe is pretty much a given now, regardless of high or low end market. The nForce3 250Gb is nice, I like what it has to offer. We are going to have to think about using it.

            It is unknown if Tyan has found the work-around with the latest Intel chipsets to get them to overclock more than 10%.  Most likely that “feature” will still be intact, but I cannot say with certainty until testing has been done on these boards.  In the desktop market Tyan has had the reputation of producing good quality parts at a decent price, but their feature sets are usually not as robust as the competition (and certainly the boards are not as flashy as what others are marketing).  At stock speeds though, Tyan’s boards have almost always been as fast, if not faster, than the competition.  Tyan does not set up their boards to be extreme overclockers, instead they tweak them to be very quick at stock speeds.

            Tyan has always been a big supporter of AMD when it comes to server class hardware, and was in fact the first partner to offer Athlon MP and Opteron based products upon the release of those processors.  Back when the VIA KT133-A was the motherboard chipset of choice for the AMD Athlon, Tyan produced a very solid product with the Trinity KT-A.  Later on their produced the feature packed Trinity KT400.  Since that time, Tyan has forgone the AMD desktop market.  It is exciting news to hear that Tyan will produce a desktop class board for the Athlon 64 series of chips by Q3.  If Tyan is interested in the current nForce 3 250Gb/Ultra chipsets, more than likely they are actively talking to NVIDIA about the upcoming PCI-E based nForce 4, which promises to be a dynamite product for the Athlon 64 (GbE, SATA-RAID, Firewall, SoundStorm 2, PCI-E).

            Tyan is still a privately held company, and the very fact that they have survived the past several years shows that they really mean business.  Hopefully Tyan will successfully re-enter the desktop market with good quality boards at a fair price.  So far their i915G and i925X based offerings look to be very solid, and should make an impact in OEM circles.

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