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TMC made a name for itself in the Super Socket 7 motherboard market with its release of the Ti5vg+ in the summer of 1998. The Ti5vg+ was met with rave reviews from sites such as Anandtech which even went as far as hailing it "The King of Super Socket 7 motherboards". Alas the experience with a large number of user's, left many feeling that the Ti5vg+ was anything but the King of Super Socket 7 motherboards, as it too was plagued with the stability & compatibility problems which affected Super Socket 7 motherboards. As time passed though the Ti5vg+ got better with each sucessive BIOS & driver update, and now is a credible Super 7 board, but it did take time. A year on, and TMC have just released a new high end Super Socket 7 motherboard designed to allow users to take advantage of the features found in AMD's new K6 III processor. This board though is in ways very similar to its predecessor the Ti5vg+ whilst at the time brining in a number of new ideas & improvements. The question remains, is the Ti5vgf better than the Ti5vg+? Ti5vgf, the featuresLike the Ti5vg+, the Ti5vgf is one of the more feature rich Super Socket 7 motherboards. Like other Super 7 boards, the Ti5vgf supports the running of 100 MHz bus processors such as the AMD K6-2 & K6 III. It also has the now standard AGP slot which is capable of running in 2X mode (66 MHz). It also features either 1 or 2 Mb of board mounted cache memory, this being declared level 3 cache for the AMD K6 III & level 2 for other chips. Again based upon VIA's MVP3 chipset the board also features UDMA 33 support for up to 4 IDE devices from its on-board controller. The big difference between the Ti5vgf and its predecessor the Ti5vg+ is immediately apparent upon viewing the board. The Ti5vgf is employs a radically (for now that is) different strategy as regards expansion slots. The board is equipped with 6 PCI slots, 1 AGP & 0 ISA slots. This board eliminates all support for legacy ISA slots in line with Intel's doctrine for future motherboards, but compensates for this by a very generous supply of up to 6 PCI slots. This board is ahead of the market with its elimination of ISA support, but some may find this restrictive. Support for memory with the Ti5vgf is also very good with the provision of 3 DIMM sockets which can hold up to 384 Mb of EDO or SDRAM. This though does not provide support for 256 Mb DIMM's which may cause some future expansion difficulties. The Ti5vgf also has eliminated support for 72 pin SIMM memory with this board, which today is no-longer that much of an issue. The Ti5vgf has full support for the AMD K6 III all the way up to 550 MHz. Obviously there is already BIOS support for these chips with the board as TMC would probably want to avoid the upgrade fiasco of early Ti5vg+ boards needing a new BIOS chip in order to run 400 MHz + CPU's. The Ti5vgf also comes with a generous range of bus speeds which include 66/75/83/95/112/124/133 MHz. Unlike many Slot 1 & Socket 370 boards there are no intermediate bus speeds of 103/105 MHz. Full processor support includes Intel Pentium (P54C), Pentium MMX (P55C), Cyrix 6x86/6x86MX & AMD K5,K6,K6-2,K6 III chips. The board also has the now standard parallel port, 2 serial ports, keyboard & mouse pS/2 connectors & twin USB connectors. The board also features the Winbond 83877 chipset for a large range of hardware monitoring functions.
To find out what Baznet Solutions thinks of this board, read on........
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