Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970 Preview

Cater-cornered to the first CPU socket on the K9HE is the ServerWorks BCM5785 HT1000. Take note that this core logic does not require an active or passive heatsink. Other Chipsets supporting Socket F will include NVIDIA's nForce Professional 3000, 3050, and 3600. Among the features for the nForce Professional 3000 series include up to four Gigabit Ethernet controllers and up to 12 SATA 2.0 connections. The nForce PRO 3600 MCP will also provide up to 28 PCI Express lanes. To the right of the BCM5785 Chipset are four SATA 2.0 ports, which are capable of RAID 0/1/5/10. Also in this corner of the motherboard is the ATA-100 IDE connection, two 4-pin fan headers, BIOS chip, front panel headers, USB 2.0 header, and Tyan TARO SO-DIMM socket.

Moving onto the expansion slots there are four PCI slots and one PCI-X 64-bit slot. Unfortunately, no PCI Express slots made their way onto the Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970. Between the expansion slots and the end of the PCB is the XGI Volari Z7 GPU with 16MB of Hynix memory and two Intel i82451 Gigabit Ethernet ASICs. Many of Tyan's recent motherboards have adopted XGI Volari Z7 (XG20) graphics and the K9HE is no different. The XGI Z7 uses an 180nm process, comes clocked at 166MHz, and uses 1.8V.

The second CPU socket is positioned above the PCI-X slot. Near both these LGA-1207 sockets, there is not much power circuitry or anything that may cause possible installation problems with the heatsink. Higher up on the motherboard is the 24-pin EPS12V power connection. The I/O ports on the rear of the motherboard include two PS/2, two USB 2.0, one COM, one VGA, and two Gigabit LAN ports.

Overall, Tyan has done yet another great job designing the Tiger K9HE motherboard and there does not appear to be any major flaws with its design. More information and performance numbers will come later with this first AMD Socket F (LGA-1207) Opteron motherboard. The Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970 should be available to the general public in the next couple of weeks.