The layout of this board is somewhat of a mystery to me. The first thing you'll notice when looking at the Thunder i860 is the location of the IDE and floppy connectors; they're buried in the upper left-hand corner of the board. To me this doesn't make a whole lot of sense regardless of the circumstances (rackmount or tower chassis). You'll be draping cables around or directly over your heatsinks which can hinder airflow. I did notice that the other i860 boards out there using a MEC are following suit so my guess would be this is based on Intel's reference design. The CPU sockets are staggered and in the upper-right quadrant of the Thunder i860. We're noticing this sort of socket positioning on a lot of Xeon boards and it can certainly cause some problems if you're using certain tower chassis'. There are no issues in my 4U rackmount chassis, but sometime in the future I might try to shoehorn this board into an Antec SX1030B and see if it plays nice.

The placement of the WTX power connector isn't -ideal- as it's buried down behind your AGP slot but considering the length of the cables on my NMB 430watt WTX power supply, it isn't a big concern as I have plenty of slack to comfortably route the cable in such a way as it's not dangling over CPU Socket 0.

Note the tremendous number of 2200uF capacitors around the CPU sockets and VRM (which of course is what that mammoth heatsink is cooling). Looking further down the board, you'll also notice that each PCI slot is littered with 1000uF capacitors. Considering the power requirements of Xeon processors and the amount of integrated features on the Thunder i860, Tyan wanted to ensure everything receives a smooth supply of power.

One thing I really -do- like is the placement of the 64bit/66MHz (3.3 volt) PCI slots. Finally, someone has placed them at the -bottom- of the board! Now people like Upaboveit can install their gigantic, full-length RAID controllers and not completely impede air flow from the bottom to the top of your case. With respect to onboard fan headers, Tyan gives us four. Two relatively close to each processor socket.

The two 68-pin LVD SCSI connections are located on the bottom of the board. Cable length generally isn't a big deal in the SCSI world (multi-device LVD cables can double as tow ropes), so this shouldn't be much of a problem, regardless. Another interesting thing to note is that all LED connections on the Thunder i860 are encased in a keyed plastic slot (it looks like a floppy connector on the right hand side of the board near the bottom). This was probably implemented for certain chassis solutions which offer a single "plug and go" system for activating LEDs and power/reset switches. Sigh, something like that needs to become a standard for the entire motherboard industry. Tyan installed an over-sized heatsink on the 82860 North Bridge, as you can clearly see to the left. It's clipped in place very securely and considering the role of this motherboard, it probably won't need to be removed for the application of a superior thermal paste solution like Arctic Silver.

Look at all of those glorious connections! Is there anything better than an integrated Intel NIC? I'm not sure if there is... It's also nice to see an integrated audio solution that doesn't have that gigantic, ugly yellow connection taking up space on your PCB. It might only be the AC'97 codec, but it will certainly get you by if listening to the odd mp3 is the extent of your audio needs.

To the right we see, of course, the MEC (Memory Expansion Card). The RIMM slots are high enough up on the card that there shouldn't be any interference with your heatsinks (this was a concern of Upaboveit's and mine prior to the board showing up). To the right, you see how the MEC is secured, via the uppermost PCI slot cover in your case. Depending on the size of your chassis, you might also be able to get the MEC's tail-end into a plastic bracket intended for long PCI devices. This wasn't possible in my 4U, however.

I think we've scrutinized the layout enough, let's move along to the BIOS.