A long time ago, I bought off eBay a Tyan S1837 motherboard. Its been sitting in my bin of misfit motherboards ever since. Mostly because it wouldn't post with any processor I put in it. So I always thought the board was dead, but I only paid $5 for it and it looked cool as all get-out, so I kept it around. looks like this: http://bbs.yjfy.com/UploadFile/2007-12/200712 … 18373367425.jpg

Long story short, I recently picked up a computer from a thrift store. Paid $10 for it and got NOTHING of value from it, save for the memory and a processor. It was one of those en-light cases, and it was so caked with cigarette tar and dust that I threw it all away. The memory was nothing special, and once I cleaned the processor I was dismayed to find it was a 600/512/100 first gen P3 processor. (Katmai)

or so I thought.

Tonight, I was going through my bin of boards and getting ready to put some on the eBay, when i got to my s1837 again the reality hit me. This thing didn't like any processor I threw at it because it didn't support P2's or coppermine p3's and that's all I was trying to use.

So I slapped in the processor, crammed a terminator in slot #2, jammed a pc100 ecc/reg stick into the memory slot and plopped a crappy agp card in the slot and put power to it. ONE LAST TIME.

And wouldn't you know it, it fired up like nothing had happened. It brought a tear to my cynical eye. I browsed the bios and OMG there is every option under the sun in there. I kid you not. Ironically, there is a bios option to set the FSB to 133, which makes me wonder if the pair of 1ghz coppermines can be made to work, but that's a project for later. I wasted no time and put a floppy drive on it and gave speedsys a whirl:

Quite impressive, if I do say so myself. But it doesn't end there. One of the other boards I tested tonight was a Tyan 1590. Its a super 7 board and quite literally, if it wasn't for the fact that it has no overclocking options past 100mhz it would be practically perfect. looks like this: http://home.datacomm.ch/artois/Pics/Thumbs+%2 … AT%20S1590S.jpg

While I realize that speedsys is not the "end all" of benchmarks nor is it perfect, but if you look at the memory throughput, something weird is going on. Isnt the MVP3 chipset supposed to be an awesome performer? Why is it getting LESS THAN HALF the bandwidth of ecc/reg ram. Yes both are running at 100mhz!

Until I do some further testing, I'm going to just assume that the 440 chipset is JUST THAT AWESOME and it is the best thing since sliced bread. Also, now that I can get this board to post the next step is to update the bios and see if my 850/100 processor will work. WOO!!! So anyway, I felt like sharing my excitement, and thanks for reading!