Tyan Tempest i5000XL S2692

Since publishing our preview of the Tyan Tempest i5000XL last month, we have received an overwhelming amount of messages from Phoronix readers who have been intrigued by Tyan's joint project with Intel on the Tempest series as well as the Toledo and Tank. While the various Tyan Tempest boards still seem to be in limited quantities, we are back again today with our performance figures for the Tyan i5000XL as well as taking a further look at its GNU/Linux compatibility. Once again, some of the features for the Tempest i5000XL include support for Intel Dempsey and Woodcrest Xeon processors, FB-DIMM modules, dual PCI Express x16, SATA2, and the Intel 5000X Chipset. Other products in the Tyan Tempest line-up include the i5000PW, i5000PX, i5000VF, i5000VS, and i5000XT.

The Tyan Tempest i5000XL motherboard that we used to carry out our testing on was a pre-production model. We had run into a few problems (such as one of the Serial ATA ports not working); however, these problems were associated to the motherboard being of pre-production status. The retail Tyan Tempest i5000XL will also use a green PCB. As mentioned in the Phoronix preview of this motherboard, in general the Tyan Tempest i5000XL is very well laid out, well in fact it was almost perfect. One of the things we would have liked to see; however, would be a second Gigabit integrated LAN port.