Six Dual Xeon Motherboards on the Cheap

Tyan Tiger I7505 (S2668AN), Continued

Two individual two-phase regulators saddled with large heat sinks supply the two Socket 604s with power.

Memory socket on the 2668AN

The Tiger i7505 gets by on conventional unbuffered memory and additionally offers support for the ECC protocol. This means that registered modules cannot be used. Tyan lets you fine-tune its memory timings, but, in contrast to the ATX board from MSI, works at fast CL 2.0-2-2-5 settings.

Tyan relies on the 82540EM Gigabit controller, too

Tyan dispenses with dual LAN on both its WTX and ATX boards. Because there is no P64H2, the Intel 82540EM LAN chip is connected via the ICH4 Southbridge.

There's room for a Promise SATA RAID controller on the Tyan board as well

With the Promise PDC20378 SATA RAID controller, the board has two additional IDE and two SATA connections that can be switched to RAID 0, 1 or 1+0. Since the controller exchanges its data through the same ICH4 interface as the Gigabit LAN chip, the connection with the E7505 Northbridge comes under no uncertain pressure. A RAID array at 40 MB/s and a LAN chip at a maximum 128 MB/s do not leave much room on the bus for extra PCI cards.

Realtek ALC650 manages 6-channel audio

Tyan equips its Tiger i7505 (S2668AN) with a Realtek sound chip. The ALC65x sound processor supports 6-channel audio that passes via the I/O onboard connections, enabling workstation system users to enjoy DVDs in 5.1 audio.

A casing fan connection on the ATX board from Tyan

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