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You probably all remember that I made a post on the front page a while back whining and moaning about wanting to review a dual Xeon system. Well, Tyan answered the call and sent me not only the board, but a nice pair of 2.4ghz Xeons to play with as well. As this is my first dual Xeon review I am giddy like a school-girl. I'll get to the good stuff shortly, but let's dispense with the formalities first, shall we? The board they sent is the one we will be looking at today, the Thunder i7500. Based on Intel's new E7500 chipset, this particular board supports a full host of cool features. Here's what Tyan has to say:
Unf! With a list of goodies like that, it's no wonder the Thunder i7500 retails for $450 (as of 5/29/02)... Without the onboard SCSI. Only you can decide if the board is worth $450 of your hard earned money (not to mention the case and special power supply), but a quick perusal of the full specifications reveals that this monster has a lot to offer. Layout I called the Thunder i7500 a "monster" and it is exactly that. It's not any bigger than any other eATX motherboard, but its unique layout makes it a bit more difficult to house in a normal case. As you can see from the picture above, the CPU sockets, and consequently the heatsink/fans, are located at the front of the board. This placement made it impossible to fit the i7500 into my old stand-by case, the Antec SX1000. The heatsink/fans were located right where my hard drives needed to go. Luckily I had a nice 4U rackmount case handy that had plenty of room. I would definitely suggest checking out the suggested list of chassis before you purchase this board. Even if your current case holds an eATX board just fine, it might not fit this eATX board. Other than the CPU placement, the board is laid-out very well. Six slots for memory (dual channel, has to be installed in pairs) are located right behind the I/O shield area where the PS2, serial, video and dual NICs are located. Speaking of dual NICs, did I already mention that the i7500 has a built-in 1000baseT (onboard gigabit baby!) NIC? The IDE ports are located way down at the bottom of the board as per usual. I used to think of this as a bad thing, but since I've been using more and more rackmount cases, I have come to appreciate the IDE and floppy ports at the bottom of the board. It makes for nice, short cable runs in a rackmount case, and let's face it... This is a server board, targetted directly at the rackmount crowd. The only actual gripe I have about the layout of this board is with the location of the power connector(s). When they throw the molex socket right next to the PCI slot like that there is just no good way to route the mess of cables coming from the power supply. They run directly over something that gets hot and/or has spinning fans, no matter how neat you tuck and roll your wiring. Not a huge problem, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.
Test System As I mentioned before, Tyan was kind enough to send me a pair of "Prestonia" Xeons at 2.4ghz to play around with. These are currently the fastest Xeons available (at the time they were pre-release), so it will be interesting to see how they stack-up against the fastest Athlon MPs out there (currently the 2000+). With a full 730mhz (actual) speed advantage and twice the L2 cache, the Xeons should smoke the Athlons... Right? Anyway, the rest of the system was pretty simple. All of the tests that we do in our motherboard reviews isolate the memory, CPU and motherboard so I only used the onboard video, a generic IDE CDRom and a Western Digital 1000JB "Special Edition" IDE hard drive. I did go ahead and get a power supply from the recommended list on Tyan's site. With all of the issues with the dual AMD boards and power supplies, I made sure to avoid any problems with the dual Xeons by buying the Enhance EPS12V supply this time. I didn't run into any issues throughout my testing and general use of the board, so I figured that it was worth noting. Windows XP Professional got the nod as the OS of choice. These are "Prestonia" Xeons and we wanted to take advantage of the hyper-threading capabilities so that only left us one choice of OS. All the latest drivers, BIOS' ("optimized defaults" loaded), security updates, etc were installed for all machines tested. Here is a breakdown of the important bits:
Whew! I know you've all been waiting patiently, so let's get started!
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