Tyan Tempest i5000XT S2696

Board Layout:

Starting in the upper right hand corner of the motherboard are the dual LGA-771 sockets. The Tyan i5000XT S2696 supports Intel's Xeon 5000 (Dempsey), 5100 (Woodcrest), and 5300 (Clovertown) series processors. The motherboard supports a 1333/1066/667MHz FSB. Surrounding both of the CPU sockets is a great deal of power circuitry. In this area is also the 4-pin CPU fan header as well as the 8-pin EPS12V/SSI power connector. Lower on the motherboard we have the FDD and a single IDE connector. For drive connectivity there is also six Serial ATA 2.0 ports and eight SAS ports. The Serial ATA ports support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 (RAID 10 is only supported by Windows at this time). The Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ports are provided by an LSI 1068E controller, which also supports integrated mirroring, integrated enhanced mirroring, and integrated stripping. Four of the SAS ports are at the front of the motherboard while the remaining four are at the rear.

The Chipset used by this motherboard is the Intel 5000X with an Intel 6321ESB ICH. These chips are covered by small aluminum heatsinks. At the rear of the motherboard we see two PCI Express x16, two PCI-X 133, one PCI Express x8, and one PCI slot. The top PCI-E x16 slot provides the full x16 lanes while the second PCI-E x16 slot only has a x4 signal and is provided by the 6321ESB. In regards to NVIDIA's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) for these dual PCI Express slots, NVIDIA hasn't officially commented on the matter other than saying no SLI support for non-NVIDIA Chipsets. However, coming from desktop motherboard manufacturers we have been told that at some time NVIDIA will enable this MultiGPU support. There are hacks available for the Microsoft Windows ForceWare drivers to enable this support, but no workaround exists for the Linux display drivers. This motherboard also features onboard IEEE-1394a Firewire from the Texas Instruments SB43AB22 controller.

Providing audio capabilities for this workstation motherboard is a Realtek ALC888 ASIC. Other ASICs on this motherboard include an ADI ADT7470 hardware monitor, Infineon SLB9635TT 1.2 TPM module, and a Winbond 82627EHG I/O ASIC. The Tyan Tempest i5000XT S2696 motherboard boasts eight DDR2 FB-DIMM slots. The i5000XT supports four memory channels and a maximum capacity of 32GB (DDR2-533) or 16GB (DDR2-667). At the top of the motherboard are the front panel connectors as well as the 24-pin and 4-pin EPS12V motherboard connectors. Built onto the S2696 motherboard are two Gigabit Ethernet ports. These networking ports are provided by the Intel 6321ESB ICH.