Ty4n Trinity Review: Bringing Extreme SLI to the AMD platform

Sometimes motherboard makers go out of their way to create a different kind of product, oftentimes this is in response to an industry trend though more often than not its to give back to the community that has supported them over the years. Soltek did this a couple years ago when they released a Springdale based motherboard that supported the new 775 pin Intel processor. The new Intel 775 pin processors at first used the same processor core as the current 478 pin versions however the new chipsets did not allow for AGP video and most only supported DDR2 memory. The new Soltek system allowed you to keep your expensive video cards and current DDR memory stock while taking advantage of the new processor architecture.

Well we have come across a real gem in the motherboard world that comes to us in a time where enthusiast and system builders need integration more than brand loyalty. You see late in 2006 during the height of the SLI vs CrossFire wars. Prototype board maker Ty4n created a motherboard that uses the better parts of both technologies for even better performance. The secret is the 2 specially designed nVidia SLI cards that are then hardwired to your primary video card. The 3 cards then work together to more than triple video performance.

We have been lucky enough to have a review sample of this motherboard here in the Ninjalane Labs and decided to fire it up for some hot gaming action.

In this review we will be looking at a prototype motherboard from Ty4n that comes with all of the modern conveniences that we have come to expect.

These features include:
7 expansion slots
Onboard SATA 3.0 with RAID, (levels 0/1/5/10)
Gigabit Ethernet
7 Channel sound
The chipset is made by VIA and comes in the traditional Northbridge, Southbridge configuration.

We should touch on the technology behind SLI before we jump into the product shots and benchmarks; SLI stands for Scanline Interleave and is a way for you to link more than one video card together to almost double performance. For this to work the video card(s) will take the current frame and split it up into smaller bits. These smaller parts are then rendered by each videocard and combined back together before going out to the monitor. In some cases there parts could be as small as a single scanline or as large as the entire frame. It really depends on the complexity of the scene and what the video drivers decide is best. Since the overall load is divided up amongst the video cards you have installed it is easy to see where the performance gains come from.