Board Room: 16.2"x13" space required..
Large space is required for community board room. Many participants will be attending. Luxurious amenities should be provided.
That's not very far off from what I'm thinking about my new motherboard. Contrary to my mentor Spock, I am very emotionally bound to a Tyan S4989WG2NR motherboard. Given just how large this board is, you really could say it's the mother of all boards.
This won't be my first four-socket motherboard. But the first didn't come any where close to the specifications of the one I'm bound to replace it with. I don't think you could easily find a better board than this:
# Specifications:Form Factor:
SSI/Extended ATX, 13" x 16.2".
PCB layer: 10-layer
# Processor:
Quad AMD Opteron Socket F, mPGA 1207-pin.
Support 4.4GHz Hyper-Transport system bus
Support AMD Opteron™ 8000 Series processors:
- Quad-Core Opteron™ 8300 Series processor (Shanghai, Barcelona)
- Dual-Core Opteron™ 8200 Series processor (Santa Rosa)
Support AMD Dual Dynamic Power Management feature
Support Four onboard 5-phase VRDs (four phases for CPU-core and one phase for North bridge)
# Chipset:
NVIDIA NPF3600 + NPF3050
PERICOM P17C9X130 PCI-E bridge
PERICOM PI2PCIE412-D SLI switch
Winbond W83793G + ADT7476
# Memory:
32x DDR2 240-pin DIMM sockets
128-bit Dual channel memory bus
Support 256GB of ECC registered DDR2-800/667/533/400 Memory. 800MHz support only at 4 DIMMs or less.
Support 1.8v memory voltage
Support Single, Dual, and Quad Rank memory. Dual Rank memory with Max speed of 533MHz.
# Expansion Slots:
Two PCI Express x16 slots
Two PCI Express x8 slots
Two PCI-X 133MHz slots
# Integrated I/O Interface:
Two USB headers
Six SATA-II connectors
Eight SAS ports (2 Mini-SAS connectors)
Two RJ-45 10/100/1000 LAN ports
One RJ-45 10/100 LAN port dedicated for IPMI
# Back I/O ports :
Stacked PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors
Stacked USB ports
Stacked COM & VGA ports
Three RJ-45 connectors
# Integrated LAN Controllers:
Intel 82571 Dual-Port Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Davicom DM9161AE (PHY) for onboard KVM-over-IP server management
Three RJ-45 ports with LEDs
# Integrated PCI Graphics:
XGI Z9S™ PCI graphics controller
32MB DDR2 frame buffer of video memory
# Integrated Storage Controllers:
* SAS Controller
LSI SAS1068E SAS controller
Support 8 SAS ports and RAID 0, 1, & 1E.
* SATA Controllers
Support Six SATA-II ports running at 3.0Gb/s from MCP55
RAID 0, 1, 5, & 10 capable.
# System Management:
KVM-over-IP server management on board
# BIOS:
AMI BIOS® on 8Mbit LPC Flash ROM
# Power Connector:
One 24-pin (2x 12-pin), 3V+5V+12V power connector
Two 8-pin (2x 4-pin), 12V power connectors
One 4-pin (2x 2-pin), 12V power connector
# Regulatory:
FCC Class B (DoC)
European Community CE (DoC)
The more I read the specifications on this board, the more all I can say is OMG!!
The other board I had strongly considered, was the Tyan S4985. But after looking at the fact it has two x4 pci-e slots, and not the wider x8, I decided the S4989 is the better solution for my needs. You simply can't find any high-performance raid cards with an x4 interface. But the real crazy thing is, the S4989 already has SAS included as standard equipment. And it ships with two multilink cables for the two SAS ports onboard. I don't know about you, but settling for less is not my objective in life.
Now I still do have some confusion here. Even though the S4985 has four x16 pci-e card slots, two of them are x4. Now I don't know if that means they are only x4, or x16 with the option of x4 as well. Based on my earlier experience with the Tyan S3992 (which was my first Tyan board), I think the slots are limited to x4 only. That being the case, the x8 is definitely preferred.
But one of the biggies here, are the 32 dimm slots. Yeah! That's 8dimms/cpu! The board has a maximum of 256GBs for memory. That's just insane. My S3992 had eight slots per cpu as well. This board has the same, for four sockets. Since I like running all of my compilations with /tmp in ram on tmpfs, the memory space should be a real boon.
This is the board I will be building my new system on. So I won't be the only one using it. This is definitely a community project. Just my way of giving back to what I believe in.
Shingoshi
That's not very far off from what I'm thinking about my new motherboard. Contrary to my mentor Spock, I am very emotionally bound to a Tyan S4989WG2NR motherboard. Given just how large this board is, you really could say it's the mother of all boards.
This won't be my first four-socket motherboard. But the first didn't come any where close to the specifications of the one I'm bound to replace it with. I don't think you could easily find a better board than this:
# Specifications:Form Factor:
SSI/Extended ATX, 13" x 16.2".
PCB layer: 10-layer
# Processor:
Quad AMD Opteron Socket F, mPGA 1207-pin.
Support 4.4GHz Hyper-Transport system bus
Support AMD Opteron™ 8000 Series processors:
- Quad-Core Opteron™ 8300 Series processor (Shanghai, Barcelona)
- Dual-Core Opteron™ 8200 Series processor (Santa Rosa)
Support AMD Dual Dynamic Power Management feature
Support Four onboard 5-phase VRDs (four phases for CPU-core and one phase for North bridge)
# Chipset:
NVIDIA NPF3600 + NPF3050
PERICOM P17C9X130 PCI-E bridge
PERICOM PI2PCIE412-D SLI switch
Winbond W83793G + ADT7476
# Memory:
32x DDR2 240-pin DIMM sockets
128-bit Dual channel memory bus
Support 256GB of ECC registered DDR2-800/667/533/400 Memory. 800MHz support only at 4 DIMMs or less.
Support 1.8v memory voltage
Support Single, Dual, and Quad Rank memory. Dual Rank memory with Max speed of 533MHz.
# Expansion Slots:
Two PCI Express x16 slots
Two PCI Express x8 slots
Two PCI-X 133MHz slots
# Integrated I/O Interface:
Two USB headers
Six SATA-II connectors
Eight SAS ports (2 Mini-SAS connectors)
Two RJ-45 10/100/1000 LAN ports
One RJ-45 10/100 LAN port dedicated for IPMI
# Back I/O ports :
Stacked PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors
Stacked USB ports
Stacked COM & VGA ports
Three RJ-45 connectors
# Integrated LAN Controllers:
Intel 82571 Dual-Port Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Davicom DM9161AE (PHY) for onboard KVM-over-IP server management
Three RJ-45 ports with LEDs
# Integrated PCI Graphics:
XGI Z9S™ PCI graphics controller
32MB DDR2 frame buffer of video memory
# Integrated Storage Controllers:
* SAS Controller
LSI SAS1068E SAS controller
Support 8 SAS ports and RAID 0, 1, & 1E.
* SATA Controllers
Support Six SATA-II ports running at 3.0Gb/s from MCP55
RAID 0, 1, 5, & 10 capable.
# System Management:
KVM-over-IP server management on board
# BIOS:
AMI BIOS® on 8Mbit LPC Flash ROM
# Power Connector:
One 24-pin (2x 12-pin), 3V+5V+12V power connector
Two 8-pin (2x 4-pin), 12V power connectors
One 4-pin (2x 2-pin), 12V power connector
# Regulatory:
FCC Class B (DoC)
European Community CE (DoC)
The more I read the specifications on this board, the more all I can say is OMG!!
The other board I had strongly considered, was the Tyan S4985. But after looking at the fact it has two x4 pci-e slots, and not the wider x8, I decided the S4989 is the better solution for my needs. You simply can't find any high-performance raid cards with an x4 interface. But the real crazy thing is, the S4989 already has SAS included as standard equipment. And it ships with two multilink cables for the two SAS ports onboard. I don't know about you, but settling for less is not my objective in life.
Now I still do have some confusion here. Even though the S4985 has four x16 pci-e card slots, two of them are x4. Now I don't know if that means they are only x4, or x16 with the option of x4 as well. Based on my earlier experience with the Tyan S3992 (which was my first Tyan board), I think the slots are limited to x4 only. That being the case, the x8 is definitely preferred.
But one of the biggies here, are the 32 dimm slots. Yeah! That's 8dimms/cpu! The board has a maximum of 256GBs for memory. That's just insane. My S3992 had eight slots per cpu as well. This board has the same, for four sockets. Since I like running all of my compilations with /tmp in ram on tmpfs, the memory space should be a real boon.
This is the board I will be building my new system on. So I won't be the only one using it. This is definitely a community project. Just my way of giving back to what I believe in.
Shingoshi
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