Tyan Thunder n3600M

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 6 May 2008 at 09:59 AM EDT. Page 5 of 6. 2 Comments.

Linux Performance:

To no surprise at all, the Tyan Thunder n3600M had worked out of the box flawlessly. We had tested this motherboard with Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 and with both Linux distributions we hadn't run into any compatibility troubles. The only slight problem we had was with sensor detection. LM_Sensors had loaded the lm85-i2c module and for the voltages it had detected one VCore, V1.5, V3.3, V5, and V12 voltages. This module had detected four fan speed sensors, but only one CPU fan speed and that was reported to be at 0 RPM, which is of course false. It had though detected one CPU temperature and the two ambient temperatures, which were both correct. The basics of LM_Sensors support is there for this SMSC Super I/O controller, but the fan speeds weren't all there nor was there the voltage and temperature for the second CPU.

The test configuration consisted of dual AMD Opteron 2356 CPUs (2.3GHz Quad-Core), 4GB of Corsair DDR2 memory, Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W PSU, and an ATI FireGL V8600 1GB graphics card. With this configuration, everything had worked out well and the system had run strong. However, as we are still waiting on the Gigabyte GA-3CESL-RH 1.4 (also based upon the nForce Professional 3600 Chipset) to arrive, our normal comparative benchmark results are postponed. However, to look at the performance of the Tyan Thunder n3600M, you can check out our AMD Opteron 2356 review. In that article we use this n3600M while testing these 2.3GHz quad-core processors in both a single and dual CPU configuration and in addition, you can see dual quad-core Intel performance against the Tyan Tempest i5400XT motherboard. In that article are results from MP3 encoding, timed disk reads, Gzip Compression, and RAMspeed benchmarks. In addition, there are results from Ogg encoding, FLAC encoding, timed mplayer compilation, timed ImageMagick compilation, Nexuiz 2.4, and SPECViewPerf 9.0.

Furthermore, standalone results from the Tyan Thunder n3600M with the dual Opteron 2356 CPUs and FireGL V8600 workstation graphics cards can be found on PTS Global. Specifically, the pcqs-server-motherboard results from the latest Phoronix Test Suite 0.5.1 release can be found on this entry page. The hardware and software configuration can be viewed there again along with the latest ImageMagick compilation, PHP compilation, Parallel BZIP2 compression, LAME MP3 encoding, IOzone, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, Sunflow Rendering System, and SPECViewPerf 9 tests.

For those that may be new to the Phoronix Test Suite or have never heard of it before, it's a project of ours that has been in development for several months now as a comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform designed to carry out qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. The Phoronix Test Suite is based upon our internal testing scripts we have been developing since 2004. The Phoronix Test Suite carries out the installation of the tests, running of the tests according to specific parameters, displaying the results, and even sharing the results. This software also takes care of other attributes such as ensuring the screensaver is shutdown and it can even monitor (and plot on a line graph) the system's voltages and temperatures as the tests are running (Sensor Monitoring With PTS). To see how your current workstation or server compares to these results, just run phoronix-test-suite benchmark pcqs-server-motherboard or better yet would be to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark phoronix-26867-32685-27954 (the ID for this page). Running the latter command will run the same set of benchmarks in the same configuration used in this article, and then once the benchmarks have been completed it will plot your results side-by-side with ours in the PTS Results Viewer. It's as simple as that.


Related Articles