Tyan Thunder n6650EX

The Tyan Thunder n6650EX has four CPU sockets for use with AMD's Socket F (1207) processors. The motherboard and its current BIOS are compliant with AMD CPUs up through the latest AMD 45nm Quad-Core Opterons in the 8300 series. This motherboard, however, is not compatible with the Opteron 2300 series. The Thunder n6650EX supports a 4.4GT/s HyperTransport interconnect link as well as AMD Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM).

With each CPU socket there is a bank of eight DDR2 DIMM sockets that support single, dual, and quad rank configurations. In total the 32 memory slots support up to 128GB of ECC Registered DDR2 memory. The DDR2 memory speeds supported are up to 800MHz, but the frequency may be lower depending upon the configuration. The layout of the CPU sockets and memory banks are ideally positioned for an easy installation, cooling performance, and similar to that of Tyan's other four-way motherboards.

Located near the bottom of the n6650EX motherboard is the NVIDIA chipset that powers this high-end motherboard. To not much surprise, Tyan went with the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 + 3050 pair for powering the S4992. Covering the two NVIDIA chips are passively-cooled aluminum heatsinks. Some of the other ASICs on the motherboard include a Pericom P17C9X130 PCI-X bridge, Pericom PI2PCIE412-D PCI-E, Analog Devices ADT7476, LSI SAS1068E 8-port SAS controller, Intel 82571EB dual Gigabit LAN, Davicom DM9161AE 10/100 LAN, and Marvell's PHY 88E1121.

In the lower right hand corner of this motherboard are all of the power connectors. Due to four Opteron sockets, 32 DDR2 DIMM slots, and five PCI Express slots, the power requirements for the Thunder n6650EX are quite high. The Tyan Thunder n6650EX supports EPS12V power supplies but requires a 24-pin, 4-pin, and two 8-pin connectors for operation. Near the power connectors are the six Serial ATA 2.0 ports. The SATA ports provided by the nForce Professional 3600 are capable of running in RAID modes of 0, 1, 0+1, and 5. Also worth noting on this lower edge of the motherboard are two SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) ports, two USB 2.0 headers, the front panel header, and a port 80 code display LED to assist in debugging hardware problems.