Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970 Preview

While AMD will not officially announce Socket F LGA-1207 with their next-generation Opteron processors for a few more days, we have managed to acquire one of the retail motherboards for this upcoming platform. The Tiger K9HE S3970 (as Tyan will officially call it) supports two AMD Opteron 2000 series processors, ECC Registered DDR2, and more. The Chipset backing this motherboard is the ServerWorks BCM5785. Accompanying the Broadcom chip is an SMSC SCH4307 Super I/O controller as well as two SMSC EMC6D103 ASICs for hardware monitoring. While we will need to wait to deliver our AMD Socket F results on GNU/Linux, we are able to deliver you this motherboard preview today.

Features:

Processors
· Two uPGA 1207-pin ZIF Sockets
· Supports up to two AMD Opteron 2000 Series CPUs
· Integrated 144-bit DDR2 memory controller

Chipset
· ServerWorks BCM5785 (HT1000)
· SMSC SCH4307 Super I/O

Memory
· Dual Channel memory bus
· Eight 240-pin DIMM sockets
· Registered, ECC DDR2 module supported, up to DDR2-667

Integrated SATA
· Supports four SATA ports at 1.5GB/s with NCQ
· RAID 0/1/5/10 supported

Expansion Slots
· One PCI-X 64-bit 133/100MHz
· Four 32-bit/33MHz PCI v2.3 slots
· One Tyan TARO SO-DIMM socket

Integrated Video Controller
· XGI Volari Z7 (XG20)
· 16MB frame buffer

Contents:

The Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970 motherboard that we have our hands on today is a retail version, and not one of the pre-production samples. Included with the Socket F motherboard were one ribbon FDD cable, four SATA cables, two SATA power adapters, one ribbon IDE cable, one USB 2.0 expansion bracket, one COM port expansion bracket, one user's manual, one quick reference guide, one driver CD, one I/O shield, and two CPU retention frames with back plates. The K9HE is only the first of many Socket F motherboards to come. Referencing the Tyan user's manual, the S3970 is designed to be a high-end server motherboard, and is claimed to be one of the most powerful server solutions available.