Intel 845E Motherboard Roundup - August 2002

Tyan S2099ANR

The S2099ANR comes with a fair amount of impressive features, with FireWire being the only feature this board doesn't include.

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Tyan also designed another board that's an exact replica of the S2099ANR, dubbed the S2099GNNR. The only difference between the S2099ANR and S2099GNNR is that the latter has a Gigabit port and ATI graphics.

To start with, Tyan went for an ATA133 Promise RAID chip supporting RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) arrays. You have the option of as many as 4 IDE channels to choose from.

Another very interesting addition to this board is the inclusion of 4 DIMM slots. This is quite a massive number of slots for an 845E board because the 845E chipset supports no more than 2.0GB of DDR266 memory, and there are numerous 845E boards on the market that only need 2 or sometimes 3 DIMM slots to support 2GB of memory. What makes the 4 DIMM slots somewhat misleading however is that you cannot install any 4 DIMMs, remember that the 845E MCH only supports 4 rows of unbuffered memory. With most modules being double sided, this means that you can only install two double sided DIMMs or four single sided DIMMs in the system. So while this will make the Tyan board a bit more flexible in attaining the 2GB limit of the 845E chipset, you still can't get around the limitations of the chipset.

The S2099ANR also comes with LAN and support for up to 6 USB 2.0 ports via the ICH4 South Bridge. There's also plenty of room for expansion with 5 PCI slots.

There's nothing much to complain about regarding the S2099ANR's layout. All IDE connectors and ATX connectors are well positioned and the 4 DIMM slots don't get in the way of installing or uninstalling your AGP card. Tyan was also nice enough to shorten a couple of the capacitors around the heatsink clamps so uninstalling your HSF isn't such a hassle.

Currently, the Tyan S2099ANR is going for around $145 in the U.S. depending on your location.

Stressing the S2099ANR

Our first "stressmarking" consisted of Prime95 torture tests around the clock. 24 hours of Prime95 torture later, we were unable to see any signs of instability. We ran Prime95 again, but with more aggressive timings than just the default SPD settings, and still the S2099ANR wouldn't even flinch. Finally, we decided to try and break the S2099ANR by filling all 4 DIMM slots with memory, only to see the S2099ANR cruise right through it. With 4 sticks of single-sided DDR266 memory installed, we were able to run our entire benchmark suite again. All in all we didn't encounter any issues with the Tyan S2099ANR running at stock speeds, at aggressive timings, or with all 4 banks of memory filled.