SoftMenu III

BIOS Interface

The Trinity K7 features Award's easy to use interface. We've used this interface for a long time and have fell in love with its simplicity and clean layout. You won't find submenus hidden under menus, nor will you have to scroll down the screen much to get to the setting you're looking for.

BIOS Main Menu

Advanced Chipset Features Menu

One new addition is the Help Menu on the right side of the screen. With it, a brief description is provided of some settings. The implementation on the Trinity K7 doesn't give setting recommendations, but it's definitely a good start. Descriptions were also pretty sparse as well.

The main performance settings you'll find are under the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu. Unfortunately, the only timing settings for SDRAM are 10ns and 8ns. Implementations we've seen from other manufacturers have settings for "Fast", "Turbo", and "Normal." Perhaps Tyan will address this issue in a future BIOS release.

Like all KX133 motherboards, the Trinity K7 will allow you to adjust the memory bus independent of the front side bus. Video settings can be adjusted as well.

As we mentioned before, one very notable omission from the BIOS was the ability to manipulate CPU settings. We've grown quite used to motherboards that allow core voltage and bus speed adjustments; some manufacturers provide even more settings to tweak with! Again, we're hoping future revisions of the Trinity K7 support this useful feature.

BIOS Features Menu

Integrated Peripherals Menu

Overclocking

Since the BIOS hardly supports it, how does on go about overclocking the processor? The answer: jumpers.

We know what you're saying, "NO! Not jumpers!!" But sadly, Tyan chose the use of jumpers rather than DIP switches. We're sure many of you know just how annoying working with jumpers can be; frankly they're irritating to us as well. Many manufacturers are implementing DIP switches on their products, and honestly, it surprises us to see that Tyan hasn't done so as well.

In any case, voltages from 1.30V-2.05V are available for adjustment via jumpers. The jumpers are fairly easy to get to, but once again we definitely would have preferred the use of DIP switches.