Overclocking

Bus Speed Settings

For adjusting the bus speed, the Trinity K7 only has four settings: 90MHz, 100MHz, 120MHz, and 133MHz.

Needless to say, while 90MHz and 100MHz worked flawlessly, we were unable to get a video signal (even with voltage adjustments) at the 120MHz and 133MHz settings. Basically, overclocking with the Trinity K7 is practically nonexistent.

Since this is Tyan's first Athlon product, perhaps they felt to stick with stability rather than risk a thorough overclocking implementation, as their Trinity 400 motherboard had several bus speeds to choose from.

Stability/Compatability

Early on, we encountered stability problems with our Trinity K7 motherboard. It turns out the Trinity K7 didn't get along well with our Apacer SDRAM. Once we plugged in our Mushkin PC133 memory, all stability problems went away.

We haven't run into problems with our Apacer memory on any other Athlon motherboard we've tested, so we're a bit unsure what to say.

Obviously it would be an extreme inconvenience to purchase a motherboard only to find out it doesn't work well with your memory! For this reason you may want to test your memory with the Trinity K7 before purchasing it if possible.

Rounding out the Trinity K7's packaging is the excellent manual. Lately we haven't spoken much about motherboard manuals, but after reading through the manual that came with the Trinity K7 we were very impressed.

Not only does the manual have detailed instructions, it also has plenty of pictures to guide new users with component installation. Make no mistake about it, this manual is right up there with the likes of ASUS, who also makes very good motherboard manuals.