Tyan Tempest i5400XT

System Setup:

Tyan is especially proud of the i5400XT (S5396) motherboard as it's the only one so far to pass Intel's Qualified Server Board program. This motherboard also has WHQL certification from Microsoft and is certified by Red Hat for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have tested the Tyan Tempest i5400XT with Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5, Fedora 8, and other recent Linux 2.6 distributions. In every single Linux distribution we tried, this motherboard had worked "out of the box" and presented no issues. The Linux experience was flawless. Using LM_Sensors with the i2c-i801, w83627ehf, and coretemp modules we were able to detect all of the onboard hardware sensors.

For testing we had loaded this motherboard up with dual Intel Xeon E5320 processors, 4GB of 8 x 512MB Kingston DDR2-533 FB-DIMM RAM, Western Digital 160GB Serial ATA 2.0 16MB cache hard drive, Serial ATA DVD-RW drive, AMD Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB, and a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W PSU. On the software side was Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel.

To look at the performance of this motherboard, we compared it to the earlier Tyan Tempest i5000XT. We had used Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (for its SMP abilities), LAME encoding, timed disk reads, Gzip compression, and RAMspeed for our Linux benchmarks. For those interested in workstation OpenGL results for this motherboard, we recently published NVIDIA cross-platform SPECViewPerf benchmarks using this motherboard on Windows Vista, Solaris Express, and Ubuntu Linux with a NVIDIA Quadro FX1700.