But, like all things in the world, you get what you pay for.  This is not a low-quality motherboard.  In fact, this is without a doubt the highest quality motherboard I’ve ever seen or used.

The quality starts with the processors: This is a Dual Slot-2 motherboard, so it’s Xeon only.  Let’s start with what this motherboard brings to the table: 

Intel 440GX Chipset

Dual Slot-2 Interface

4 DIMM Slots supporting a max of 2GB

(1) AGP 2x

(6) PCI

Adaptec 7896 Dual Channel SCSI Chipset with (2) 68-Pin and (1) 50-pin connectors

The first thing a purchaser of this board will notice is its huge size.  At 12 inches square, this baby is Extended-ATX, and requires a special case to allow PROPER mounting of the Xeons.  In order for a case to properly support this board, the case needs to be compatible with the Intel Marlinspike MS440GX Specification.  There are only a few cases that meet this spec, so buyers beware.  I used the Liteon FS-020 case that I purchased from Outside Loop for $179.  While I review the case separately, this case rocks and I highly recommend it for anyone, regardless of what motherboard they’re using.

As you’ll see by the included pictures, this motherboard uses special mounting brackets to attach the Xeon processors.  Each processor has a set of guide rails, a handle that attaches to it, and 2 screws to screw the handle into the rails.  Once these processors are seated, they will N O T fall out.  And it’s a good thing they have this retention mechanism, since they weigh well over a pound with the heatsink and cooling fans attached.  Putting in a Xeon processor requires up to 35lbs of pressure, according to Intel.  And they also give each processor a lifespan of only 50 insertions.  I found that to be rather odd, but since they make the processor I assume they know its limitations.   

I bought my heatsink/cooling fans from PC Power and Cooling, and they are of excellent quality.  These heatsinks are huge, as you can see from these pictures.  The Tyan board has 4 connectors for the cooling fan power, so I didn’t have to use any messy adapters.  PC Power and Cooling also supplied me with a 110 Alert, which makes a loud noise if system temp exceeds 110 degrees.  For $13, I felt this was cheap insurance.  They also threw in a set of brass thumbscrews for free, which was nice.   

Once I flashed to 1.06, I never had another crash, lockup, or hang.  The machine has been 100% stable.  My theory is that the board they sent me was used internally and had a bad BIOS flash.  I know Tyan has a good QA team and they wouldn’t let a board with those problems into the retail channel.  My experience with tech support only served to confirm Tyan’s excellent reputation for customer service. 

The Thunder-X supports 66, 100, 103, and 112 MHz bus speeds.  However, I never tried to overclock this system, since practically no one who owns a Xeon box would really try and overclock it. 

Here are the specs of the machine as tested: 

Tyan Thunder-X Motherboard w/1.06 Bios

Dual 500 MHz/1MB Cache Pentium III Xeons

(2) 256 MB PC 100 DIMMS

(1) 9GB Seagate Cheetah U2W LVD

(1) 18GB Seagate Cheetah

(1) Maxtor 40GB UDMA/66 5400 RPM

(1) Western Digital 30GB UDMA/66 5400 RPM

Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra

Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI Controller

ADS Technologies Pyro FireWire Controller

Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!

3Com 3C905B NIC

Plextor UltraPlex 40X CD-ROM

Matshita 4X SCSI CD-R 

I also have a Matrox Millennium G-400 Max, but I decided not to use it since the Windows 2000 drivers for the G-400 Max are rather buggy and the 3D performance just sucks with those drivers, as well.  I wish Matrox would get the TurboGL working for Windows 2000, as well as fix a few other issues that the card has in Win2k.   

This is what a Xeon looks like nekkid.  I didn't feel like drilling out rivets to expose the other side of the proc, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  The case was remarkable easy to remove, btw.

The Thunder-X has Adaptec’s 7896 Dual Channel U2W SCSI Controller.  This is excellent.  Considering the cost and target market of the board, it would have been nice to have a 100 Mbit NIC onboard as well, but the lack of it is nothing major. 

The overclocking features of this board are nothing special.  103 and 112 MHz seem to be the only additional bus speeds, but I didn’t test them.  If you want to overclock your system, you shouldn’t be buying Xeon processors.  Since this is a Xeon board, I don’t fault Tyan at all for not having a wider range of bus speeds to choose from. 

The BIOS is an American Megatrends (AMI) but isn’t the graphical AMIBIOS the Supermicro PG-DGE board has.  While I prefer the graphical BIOS, this one is perfectly fine and gets the job done.  All of the appropriate thermal monitoring and electrical monitoring options are there. 

In addition to the onboard SCSI, I threw an Adaptec 2940 UW controller in there.  It worked properly, which doesn’t always happen with a 7896 on board.  In some systems, this will cause a memory fault error.  But more importantly, the 2940 didn’t act as the primary controller, which almost always happens when you have an onboard and a separate SCSI controller.  I’m using my 2940 as a dedicated SCSI card for video capture, for those who are interested. 

The included Intel LANDesk monitoring software provides a host of information including thermal temperature and voltage.  LANDesk is designed for business networks and allows a central server to monitor, log, and send alerts of this information.  One other nice feature is that it allows monitoring of drives with S.M.A.R.T. technology to predict drive failures. 

In addition, Tyan offers a version of this motherboard with a RAID slot to take advantage of Adaptec’s RAID cards.  This is useful for those who plan on using this board for a server. 

Tyan delivers 5 PCI slots, and a single shared ISA/PCI slot.  With 6 PCI available and a dual channel SCSI controller onboard, this board has plenty of expansion room.  I’ve got a 2940, a NIC, a FireWire card, and an SB Live! in there and I still have 2 PCI slots left.  Even if I were to throw a modem in there, that still leaves me room for one more PCI card.  And considering most users won’t be using an additional SCSI card, that leaves 2 free slots.  Either way, there’s room for 2 NIC’s so you can use DSL or cable and your home LAN, too. 

Since this board is GX-based, it offers 4 DIMM slots that can each take up to a 512MB DIMM, for a total of 2GB.  For a high-end workstation or a server, this is a must-have. 

I have a nitpick with this board, so I’ll start with it.  For some reason, instead of mounting the case connectors (power switch, LED’s, etc) vertically like every other motherboard I’ve ever seen, Tyan mounted them horizontally like two little r’s on top of each other.  This makes connecting these cables (which are already small enough) a pain.  That’s the biggest complaint I have overall with this board’s usability.  Unfortunately, no photographs of this turned out well enough to use.

Starting at the top of the board, you’ll notice it has two power supply connectors so those of you building a zero-downtime machine will be able to use redundant power supplies.  Considering the market segment this board is targeted to, this is a nice touch.  Both connectors are located to the right of the processor slots, out of the way of everything else on the board so you won’t have any problems there. 

For the most part, jumpers are well marked and in accessible locations.  Just about all of the jumpers are in the lower right corner of the board, so you won’t have to remove anything except full-length expansion cards to get to jumpers. 

DIMM slots are located directly above the AGP slot, and they are well out of the way of any heatsink you could possibly use on a Xeon.  If you’re overclocking your video card and it generates a LOT of heat, you may want to skip using the DIMM slot closest to the AGP slot. 

All floppy and hard disk connectors are located in the middle of the board up against the right edge.  This is a good location, but because there are so many (2 IDE, 1 Floppy, 3 SCSI) you’re bound to have a bit of a rat’s nest if you use them all.  Such is the price for power. 

This motherboard has enough connectors to power 2 case fans and 4 CPU fans, which should be enough for anyone.

As I mentioned, the board was problematic in the beginning, but was 100% cured after a BIOS flash.  In order to verify there was nothing wrong with the board, I torture tested it.  I looped 3D benchmarks for hours.  I powered off the system in the middle of software installs.  I even deleted some program keys from the registry.  The system refused to lock up on me.  Just when I thought I had it locked, it would come back and be responsive.  This was under both Win2k and Windows 98 SE.  While I can’t say that the high quality of this motherboard is the only reason this system didn’t lock or crash, I know it contributes to it.  Just the fact that it’s worked perfectly with weeks of intensive usage of both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 is impressive enough in itself. 

This is especially true when you look at all the peripherals stuffed into this thing.  Lots of IRQ sharing was happening, as I purposely didn't change anything from default settings.  Even NT 4 didn't have any problems and NT 4  isn't always easy on systems with lots of peripherals from disparate vendors.

Due to the stability of this motherboard, I have no qualms in recommending it as a server solution.  I normally prefer servers from Tier One OEM’s like Compaq or Dell, but I think a Thunder-X based server will be just as stable and perform as well as a name-brand server, assuming you put quality peripherals into it. 

Windows 2000 Professional: 
For some reason, it seems that getting a motherboard to work with ACPI in Win2k is a major challenge to manufacturers.  Nearly every motherboard I've worked with doesn't properly work as an ACPI motherboard in Windows 2000.  Unfortunately, this motherboard didn’t want to work with ACPI either.  I don’t feel that this is a big deal, in that I’m fairly sure future BIOS revs will fix this.  Even if for some reason it doesn’t I don’t count that as a serious strike against the Thunder-X because I don’t place a large amount of importance on ACPI compliance.   As far as I can tell, the biggest advantage ACPI gives you is soft power down. 

Besides the ACPI issue, the Tyan Thunder-X runs like a champ in Windows 2000.  No errors, lockups, or system weirdness. 

Rating 75%

Windows NT 4.0
The only “problem” a potential NT 4 user will need to be aware of is that NT 4 doesn’t include drivers for the 7896 U2W controller, so you’ll need to use the included disks to allow NT to see any devices on the U2W controller during setup.  This shortcoming is purely Windows NT 4.0’s, not Tyan’s. 

Rating 100% 

Windows 98 Second Edition 
Who would buy this board for Win98, I don’t know.  But it does work, and works perfectly, albeit with only one CPU being utilized. 

Rating 100% 

BeOS 5
BeOS 5 ran perfectly on this board, although I only had the freeware version so I was unable to test SMP abilities.

Rating 100%

BackOffice 4.5
Since some people would buy this as a server, I threw BackOffice 4.5 on there, and it too worked perfectly.  Since it’s based on Windows NT 4.0, that’s to be expected. 

Rating 100%

Unequivocally, emphatically, and enthusiastically, YES.  This board is without a doubt the finest motherboard I’ve ever used, and is worth every penny of its price.  Besides making an excellent workstation, I would not hesitate to recommend the Tyan Thunder-X as a midrange server solution.  A dual Xeon system based on this board could easily support 100 or more users, depending on RAM and disk requirements.  Loaded with 2GB of RAM, RAID 5, and 500+ MHz CPU’s, I would bet this system could act as the main server for several hundred users.  The performance was stellar in every OS tested, and Chevrolet had better watch out, because this board is like a rock when it comes to stability.

The lack of ACPI support and the funky case connectors are the only places this board loses points.  Six PCI slots plus the Adaptec SCSI gives plenty of room to expand.  The board works very well in every OS I’ve tried.  Since the case connectors are a one time only hassle, I don’t deduct points for this. 

J.C. Lane (Granite)

4.5 out of 5.  When ACPI works in Win2k, this board is a solid 5 out of 5.