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The TMC Ai5tv was an excellent motherboard based aound Intel's i430VX chipset. Its small size concealed the fact that here was an extremely comptant all round board which offered users many features. This board was first seem in 1996 with Intel's VX chipset and was produced up until late 1997. During this period there were a number of revisions which saw the addition of split voltage CPU compatibility (thus was able to run Intel Pentium MMX & AMD K6 processors) and the provision for an extra DIMM socket. The board used in this review is a revision 1.3C. Ai5tv, the featuresThe feature set of the Ai5tv is very similar to other boards based on the VX chipset. Packaged within the compact Baby AT form factor this board supports Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, Cyrix 6x86, Cyrix 6x86 MX, AMD K5 and AMD K6 processors. This is supported by either 256 kb or 512 Kb of level 2 cache memory. The Ai5tv can support up to 128 Mb of 72 pin SIMM memory (either FPM or EDO) and up to 64 Mb SDRAM DIMM memory. Accomodation for memory is provided by four SIMM banks and only 1 DIMM socket (version 2 had two DIMM sockets). The SIMM sockets can only accomodate SIMMs of 4, 8, 16 & 32 Megabytes. The board supports bus speeds of 50, 60 and 66 MHz, with clock multiples of 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 and 3.5 supported. This allows fitting of an Intel Pentium MMX 233 CPU. Unfortunatly this board can not run an AMD K6 233 as it DOES NOT support a core CPU voltage setting of 3.2v. The expansion capabilities of this board are very good, especially in view of its compact Baby AT layout. The board contains 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA with one of these being a shared slot. The bias here is towards the PCI slots which today is preferable to ISA slots, although back in 1996/7 this may have felt slightly restrictive. The Ai5tv has an award BIOS which includes features such as ISA Plug and Play (PnP) extensions and power management features which include slowing down the CPU clock and monitor and hard disk power saving functions.
To find out what Baznet Solutions thinks of this board, read on........
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