Well, I think Tyan has improved the
pot with the S1598. No, it is not the perfect board, but compared to
many of its competitors, it isn’t bad at all. Let’s look at it.

Feature-wise, the board is not
lacking. It has all the standard features of a Super 7 board. It has
5 PCI slots, all capable of handling a full-length card. It has 2
ISA slots, one capable of handling full length while the other could
if you don’t use the PC speaker and ACPI LCD connectors. It supports
all the standard bus speeds, although I was surprised that it didn’t
offer any support beyond 100 MHz. That’s kind of a slap in the face
to overclockers. The board uses the MVP3 chipset, a very good one.
Using Via’s new Service Pack 4.01, you can install all of Via’s
drivers and patches in one swoop. Quite nice, and about time. These
drivers are available on the Via site.

After some research into the board,
I found some info on the Via chipset. Apparently, the Via North
Bridge on this board is the VT82C598AT, Rev. CD, a revision that was
revised and re-released due to incompatibilities and problems. I find
it interesting that Tyan used this chipset anyway for the S1598. I’m
sure future revisions will not use this chipset.

The layout is good. Like most
Super 7 boards, the design is quite open, leaving lots of space.
There are few capacitors on the board. The important jumper blocks
are located out in the open, so you don’t have to do the twist to
adjust the settings with the board installed. Due to so much space,
Tyan had plenty of room to print the jumper settings right on the
PCB, allowing for pretty easy setup. But, if you want, the manual is
quite detailed, so you can turn to that too. Speaking of manuals,
Tyan, I think, is one of the few manufacturers still choosing to
print a manual of this quality. Many manufacturers are now including
a quick-start guide and putting the full manual in PDF on a CD. Many
might appreciate Tyan’s extra effort here.

The board runs quite well. It was
easy to setup. We had it in a very loaded down system and it seems
to run great. You can’t really expect staggering numbers since this
is not an overclocker’s board, but using the standard specs of the
latest CPU’s, this board offers slightly better than average
performance than its competitors.

Some down-sides to the board: It
doesn’t support any quick bus speeds. It boasts a very quick 4ns L2
cache, but the 8 ns L2 tag ram would hinder any overclockability of
the L2 cache. Simply put, this isn’t an overclocker’s board. Second,
Via did not use all the power this board could offer with this
chipset it has. This chipset supports both Ultra ATA-66 and AMR slots.
They took advantage of the ATA-66 support, but did not do anything
with the AMR support. This probably isn’t a big deal for you, but
its an issue. And third, it would have been nice to lose an ISA slot
and throw in a 6th PCI. Hint hint, Tyan.

Overall, this is a fine board. Good
quality, good performance, and a pleasure to work with. If Tyan
would throw in some higher bus speed settings, add a PCI slot, and
change to a newer revision of the chipset, this would be one of the
best boards out there. Keepa chuggin’, Tyan!