Actually, the Tyan S2885 doesn't support DDR400 (PC3200) memory. It only supports PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 DIMMS, so using the DDR400 could be a big part of your problem. I have had a TYAN S2885 board for several months now (even a prerelease board), and the main problem I have had is with the AGP graphics. There is a lot of work going on to get the AGP graphics/Nvidia drivers working correctly on this board, as far as BIOS updates to put proper values in the MTRRs, new drivers, kernel patches, etc.. There is a kernel bug in the mtrr code that makes the system broken with over 4 GB of memory.
Actually, actually, all of the above is now fixed except for the AGP write bandwidth issue, which peaks at about 275MB/s for 4x and 335 MB/s for 8x for as-yet unknown reasons. Tyan asked for my benchmarks the other day and for tips on installing SuSE and a -156 kernel, so I believe they may be taking a look. The BIOS I'm running on the 2885 is the '0.01b' BIOS here (don't ask why the numbering of what appears to be an improvement appears to break sequence back to zero): ftp://ftp.tyan.com/Chipset_AMD/K8/2885BIOS/ And there's an official beta here that doesn't include the "memory hole" option which gets you your full N GB of memory available even with a big AGP aperture: http://www.tyan.com/support/html/bios_support.html#beta These also "unlock" the HT clock frequency, so you can easily bump to 800 MHz and see those AMD signalling errata in action. :) I have managed to get everything on the board to work well except the lmsensors support (which I haven't yet tried), SATA RAID (single disks works fine) and good AGP bandwidth. The AGP problem appears to be on Tyan's radar now and I verified that it works fine on another 8151-carrying board (the Iwill DK8X) so I'm hopeful that a solution will manifest. When it does, I'll post a complete howto for the S2885. -mcq