Tyan Tempest i5000VF & i5000VS

Since the beginning of June we have had the Tyan Tempest i5000XL S2692 in our labs, and through its stay, we have continued to be impressed by this well designed motherboard for Intel's Bensley Platform. Continuing in a benchmarking tempest, up on the bench today we have the Tyan i5000VF and i5000VS. Both of these motherboards use the Intel 5000V Blackford Chipset with ESB2 Southbridge; however, there are a few minor changes between these two contenders. For instance, the number of memory slots, integrated Ethernet connections, and expansion slots are different between the VF and VS variants. However, the similarities are many when it comes to the Serial ATA ports and functionality, dual LGA-771 CPU sockets for use with Dempsey or Woodcrest processors, and the overall layout. We have fired up both of these motherboards with Woodcrest processors and have put it up against its Greencreek counterpart -- the Tempest i5000XL. Below are the general features for both of the motherboards.

Features:

Processor
· Dual LGA771 sockets
· Support up to two Intel Xeon processors 5000/5100 series; Dual-Core
· 1066/1333MHz FSB; VRD 11.0

Chipset
· Intel 5000V chipset
· Intel 6321ESB I/O Controller Hub
· SMSC SCH5017 Super I/O chip

Memory
· 240-pin DDR2 FBDIMM sockets
· Dual memory channels
· Supports ECC memory
· Supports DDR2 FBDIMM 667/533MHz

Integrated Video Controller
· XGI Volari Z7 (XG20); PCI interface
· 16MB DDR frame buffer of video memory

Integrated SATA Controller
· Six (6) SATA 2.0 ports from Intel ESB2
· RAID 0, 1, 5 supported

Form Factor
· SSI CEB v1.01 footprint (12" x 10.5")

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

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

Contents:

Both the i5000VF S5370 and i5000VS S5372 continued to be packed in Tyan's generic retail container. The contents for each of these motherboards consisted of the motherboard themselves, one FDD ribbon cable, one IDE ribbon cable, three Serial ATA power adapters, six Serial ATA data cables, one USB 2.0 header, one Serial port header, one user's manual, one quick reference guide, one driver CD, one I/O shield, and two CPU back-plates. While the i5000XL that we had looked at was a pre-production model, both motherboards we have our hands on today are indeed the real retail McCoy.