Tyan Tempest i5000XL S2692 Preview

With Computex Taipei 2006 wrapping up today, Tyan Computer Corporation was again a heavy-hitter at this year's expo. If you will recall from our coverage last year, Tyan was first to launch an 8-way server solution that was capable of handling up to eight AMD Opteron's in a 4+4 board configuration. This June, Tyan once again has a slew of new products reaching the market. In fact, Tyan has seven new Xeon motherboards based upon the LGA-771 socket that are compatible with Intel Dempsey and Woodcrest processors. Since the start of the month we have had two of these Tyan motherboards at Phoronix for testing -- the Tempest i5000XL S2692 and the Tiger i7520SD S5365. While all of our benchmarking and performance articles will come later this month, today we are offering up a quick preview of the Tempest i5000XL.

While a product page for the S2692 motherboard has now appeared on Tyan's website, and it looks like the product design has been finalized, what we have in our hands to look at today is a pre-production sample of the motherboard. As can be seen from the coming pictures, at the time of receiving the product, not everything was perfected. Before diving into everything that this motherboard offers, below are Tyan's specifications on the Tempest i5000XL S2692.

Processor
· Dual LGA771 sockets
· Supports up to two Intel Xeon "Dempsey / Woodcrest" processors
· Dual-Core, 1333/1066/667MHz FSB; VRD 11.0

Chipset
· Intel "Greencreek" MCH + ESB2-V chipset
· Winbond 82627EHF Super I/O chip

Memory
· Four (4) 240-pin DDR2 FBDIMM sockets
· Dual channel memory; supports ECC DIMMs
· Supports maximum of 16/8GB of DDR2-533/667

System Management
· SMSC EMC 6W201 Hardware Monitor
· CPU thermal & voltage monitor support
· Five (5) fan headers (4-pin configuration)
· Infineon SLB9635TT 1.0 (Trusted Platform Management); option

Integrated SATA Controller
· Six (6) SATA 2.0 ports running at 3.0Gb/s
· RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 supported

Integrated Audio Controller
· HDA link; SPDIF port in rear
· RealTek ALC880 controller (High-Def. Audio)
· Stacked Mic-in/Line-in/Line-out rear ports
· Front panel audio header
· CD-in, Aux-in headers (4-pin configuration)

Integrated LAN Controllers
· One Intel"Gilgal" (82563EB) PHY
- Direct link to ESB2
- One Gigabit Ethernet LAN port
- One front panel LED pin header

BIOS
· Phoenix BIOS on 8Mbit Flash ROM
· Supports APM 1.2, ACPI 1.0b
· Serial Console Redirect
· PXE via Ethernet, USB device boot
· PnP, DMI 2.0, WfM 2.0 Power Management
· User-configurable H/W monitoring
· Auto-configuration of hard disk types
· Multiple boot options
· 48-bit LBA support

Form Factor
· CEB footprint (12" x 10.5")

Power
· EPS12V / SSI (24 + 8 pin) power connectors

Regulatory
· FCC Class B (Declaration of Conformity)
· European Community CE (DoC); BSMI