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TMC launched its Super Socket 7 motherboard range in the summer of 1998. Based around the newly released VIA MVP3 chipset, both the Ai5vg+ (AT form factor) and Ti5vg+ (ATX form factor) boasted many features that were previously only the preserve of Pentium II motherboards based upon LX and BX chipsets. PC users now had the a realistic choice of motherboard if they wanted to use non-Intel chip designs such as the AMD K6 family and Cyrix MII. At last there seemed to be a levelling of the playing field between Intel and its smaller rivals with Super Socket 7, especially with a board such as the Ti5vg+. Ti5vg+, the featuresThe Ti5vg+ was probably the first serious Super Socket 7 motherboard to hit the market in the summer of 1998. After a number of patchy AT form factor boards from other makers TMC launched a serious contender to the power user. The Ti5vg+ contained many features such as AGP and the ability to run the 100 MHz bus. It also allowed users to specify up to 1Mb of level 2 cache memory, which was mounted on the board itself. This was the first mainstream ATX Super Socket 7 board. Memory can be accomodated in either two 72 pin SIMM sockets or three 168 pin DIMM sockets. This is a very good design feature as it allows upgraders to choose between using older EDO RAM which they may want to keep of to fit the latest PC100 SDRAM. Maximum SIMM memory configuration allows for 128 Mb RAM compared to 384Mb SDRAM maximum. This is a reasonable figure although this is outclassed by some PII boards which can support up to a massive 1 Gb of memory. Expansion slots are very well catered for in the Ti5vg+, with 1 AGP, 5 PCI and 2 ISA slots provided. This is fast becoming the industry standard with motherboard manufacturers as the move towards PCI only peripherals continues at an increasing pace. The lack of ISA slots felt restrictive when the board was launched but this has changed as more and more peripherals such as sound cards have moved to the faster PCI bus. The provision of PCI slots on the Ti5vg+ is generous and this is something which has to be commended as TMC clearly looked to future compatibility rather than backwards. Other featues of the Ti5vg+ include 2 USB ports, Winbond W83781D hardware monitoring (very useful!), two EIDE channels (standard on most boards these days), LAN wake up and IrDA connectors. The Ti5vg+ supports bus speeds of 60, 66, 75, 83 and 100 MHz. It supports Intel Pentium/MMX, AMD K5/K6/K6-2/K6 III, Cyrix 6x86/6x86MX/MII and other (Note NOT Intel Pentium II family) processors.
To find out what Baznet Solutions thinks of this board, read on........
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