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Intel E7505 Chipset - Motherboard Round-Up

It's been a while since Intel launched their new dual XEON Workstation chipset, the E7505. I took a look at a few pre-production E7505 based boards at the initial launch (MSI's E7505 Master and Iwill's DP533), but all the big players have since polished their platforms and prepared for primetime. Today we'll be looking at three of the major players in the workstation market... Tyan's Thunder i7505, MSI's E7505 Master LS2, and Iwill's DP533.

It's early in the game for the E7505 chipset and supply is still struggling to meet demand. Right now there are only four major players in this market segment and three of the four are represented here today (Supermicro being the one exception). Supermicro's offering didn't make it here in time for this review, but I have received one of their E7505 boards (and there are a few sleepers from other companies out there too), so it will follow shortly. Even so, this round-up should give a very good cross section of the platform as a whole, and it will definitely give us some insight into each manufacturer's approach and how they differ from one another.

All three of the boards we're looking at today are built around the same components, but yet they are very different boards. I'll elaborate more on that in a bit, but in the meantime, let's look at the current E7505 based options from the three companies and see where our review boards (in bold below) fall in line. In alphabetical order:

As you can see, there are a few choices available from these three manufacturers. The three boards I received were all very similar the only major difference being the presence of onboard SCSI controllers. All three boards follow the SSI standard, all require EPS12V power supplies. The Thunder i7505 had Adaptec U320 SCSI, the E7505 Master LS2 used LSI U320 SCSI and the DP533 had no SCSI onboard. I won't go too deep into the the E7505 chipset details here as I've already covered that elsewhere. All three boards do include GoC NICs and onboard audio, so the playing field is pretty level.