Computer Reviews

Motherboards are not only for desktop computers and its easy to forget that there is also a huge market for motherboards in areas such as servers.

Motherboards for servers have a much differet focus that those used for desktop computers. The very nature of servers means that they are meeting the needs of many users at the same time, and so need to be designed differently.

More than one processor is very common in order to handle the number of processes created by being accessed by many users at the same time. A large amount of memory is also needed to handle this. Servers have often had more memory than most desktop computers. They also need to be secure, so use of things such as ECC memory help to ensure that nothing gets lost while it is in the computer.

Massive storage space is also common and this motherboard comes with 6 SATA2 slots, allowing for a lrage configuration of drives into an array, with RAID 0, 5 and 10 being supported. There is integrated audio, 4 USB ports and a LAN port for your convenience.

Two Intel LGA771 sockets allow the use of two Intel Xeon Dempsey/Woodcrest processors.

From the Tyan website:

High-end workstation performance comes to the entry-level market with the introduction of the Tempest i5000XL (S2692). Using Intel’s 5000X chipset, the Tempest i5000XL delivers support for (2) Intel® Xeon® 5000 and 5100 sequence processors; FBDIMM support; dual PCI Express x16 slots for SLI capability, as well as multiple PCI slots; built-in Audio, SATA2 with RAID, and onboard dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, all in an SSI CEB (12″ x 10.5″) compact form factor for mid to full-size tower configurations.

Although it may be entry-level it is still expensive compared to even the coolest of desktop motherboards, but you do get a helluva lot. It has SLI support if you need hardcore graphics and practically everything else you could need from a motherboard.

Check out the full preview at Phoronix

Hardwarezone takes a sneak peak at the 2 motherboards for the new socket AM2 from AMD. These boards are not in production yet, but give a glance at what to expect.

The AM2 will be compatible with current AMD chipsets because of the hypertransport technology remaining the same. The 940 pin chips will not be compatible with the older 940 pin layout that was used before.

The AM2 chips will include integrated DDR2 controllers, allowing them to use DDR2, rather than the older DDR, which they were stuck with using for such a long time.

Despite the compatibility with older chipsets, Nvidia have released the new 500-series chipsets to compliment the release of these new chips.

Both of these fully-features boards make good platforms on which to build a new computer based on the new AMD chips. Check them out to see how they look.

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Biostar are attempting to get into the enthusiast overclocking part of the computer sector with this new model. The T-series represents their high-perfromance boards.

In the review at bit-tech.net they have a closer look at how well it performs, especially compared to the other boards in the same price range as this one.

The board itself is well set out with the 24 pin power cable input being the strangest positioned thing on this board. Sitting back near the USB ports it makes wiring a bit of a drag as the wires have to pass across the board from the back of the PSU.

One of the other strange things was the lack of a manual in the box, which was a little strange, although it was probably just forgotten on this box, as I don’t think there is any great reason to not have one. The cost saving could only be minor by leaving it out.

There is an option to set the voltage of the DDR2 modules to 3.3V, which is actually too much for them. With standard voltages of 1.8V this should fry them within a few hours.

Much of the board is set out alright, not too well, but not too badly either. The features it includes are good. A 280MHz FSB speed was all that they could get out of the board which doesn’t rate that great against some of the competition that can be overclocked to much higher levels than that.

For gaming enthusiasts it will not meet the grade. It does well generally, but not enough for those who want to dish out all this cash for a motherboard. Check out the full review at bit-tech.net

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