The Tyan S1854 motherboard was a fairly high-end piece of electronics for home built computers, released in late 2000 and early 2001. The motherboard was noted for being one of the first commercially available that used the AGP 4x graphics card slot, and was based off of the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset. At its release, it represented impressive hardware performance, but with today's technology, trying to build a machine off of this motherboard is an exercise in computer archeology.
CPU and RAM
The VIA Apollo 133A chipset was a transitional model, and was able to accommodate both Slot I Pentium II and Pentium III CPUs, as well as the Socket 370 Celeron CPUs. (Celeron CPUs of this era were functionally Pentium IIIs with some features disabled, and a full speed on board cache module). The motherboard's front side bus is 66 MHz, 100 MHz or 133 MHz, auto determined by the CPU put into the machine, and it can support CPUs running at anywhere from 300 MHz to 750 MHz for the Pentium III family, and 533 MHz for the Celerons. The motherboard supports up to 3 slots of 3.3 volt SDRAM, in either the PC100 or PC133 speeds. (It predates DDR-style RAM). The maximum RAM the system can support is 3x 256 MB chips, for 768 MB total.
Expansion Slots & Connectivity
The primary selling point of this motherboard while it was new was the AGP 4x video card slot; it contains no onboard graphics capabilities, so a video card is required. It does, however, have the Creative Labs onboard sound chipset, as well as integrated joystick, audio in, speaker and microphone connectors. It can still support a PCI video card, and the machine has 6 PCI slots, as well as one legacy ISA expansion slot. The motherboard has two USB 1.2 ports, which are considerably slower than current standards, but are backwards compatible with them. It also has two serial ports and one parallel port.
Hard Drive & Media Connectors
The computer comes with two 40 pin EIDE connectors for connecting hard drives (allowing four hard drives to be connected---a "master" and "slave" on each connector.) It also supports an EIDE CD-ROM drive connector, and has dual floppy disk drive connectors capable of handing 3.5" floppy disks.
Tags: video card, card slot, Celeron CPUs, hard drives, this motherboard, Tyan S1854