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During the long reign of the Socket 7 motherboard there was the introduction of a new format of motherboard. This was of course the ATX form factor which was essentially a complete re-design of motherboard layout. With it came many new features such as Communication ports, serial ports and other connectors soldered directly onto the motherboard. ATX also saw the CPU being moved from alongside the expansion slots to above them, thus allowing full length expansion cards to be fitted in all slots. ATX also allowed the inclusion of other features which could only benefit the humble PC. The Ti5tv was TMC's effort at creating a VX chipset ATX board. Ti5tv, the featuresAs with many other VX chipset motherboards there are a number of common features. Of these the Ti5tv includes the ability to support Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, Cyrix 6x86, Cyrix 6x86MX, AMD K5 and AMD K6 processors up to clock speeds of 233 MHz. These are backed up by a standard 512 Kb of level 2 cache (mounted on the board). The Ti5tv has an advantage over the Ai5tv in that it CAN run an AMD K6 233. It supports voltages from 2.5v through to 3.3v. Unfortunatly it does not support voltages as low as 2.2v so it is unable to run chips as fast as the AMD K6 266 & 300, which is unfortunate. The Ti5tv only supports bus speeds of 50, 60 and 66 MHz. Although this is enough for ordinary running the lack of a 75 MHz bus setting precludes the running of Cyrix 6x86+ PR200 processors. Also it will leave the overclocking community somewhat disappointed. Clock multipliers of 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 and 3.5 are supported. Memory expansion is as with VX boards somewhat limited (by today's standards) to a maximum of 128 Mb. This can be accomodated in either four SIMM slots or two DIMM slots. Users can fit FPM, EDO or SDRAM to this board. Expansion slots on the Ti5tv (Version A) are the same as the Ai5tv with four PCI and three ISA slots supported. Once again TMC has a bias towards PCI with this board which is appreciated very much again today. Unlike the Ai5tv, the Ti5tv runs with an American Megatrend (AMI) BIOS. This is pleasant to use with its neat GUI layout, although many (including us at the Processor Emporium) prefer the list based Award BIOS of the Ai5tv. As with any self respecting Socket 7 board the Ti5tv comes with an onboard bus mastering EIDE controller. It comes with ISA Plug and Play (PnP) extensions and power management features. It also comes with a CPU temperature overheat protection feature which automatically enters Standby mode when the CPU temperature exceeds 80C. Very useful for owners of Cyrix 6x86+ processors.
To find out what Baznet Solutions thinks of this board, read on........
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