For a little over a decade, Tyan has been providing the high-end PC market with motherboards; whether you were talking about the workstation or the server market segments, Tyan was there. Although they've never been too big in the enthusiast community, Tyan has had a few brief successes with desktop motherboards through the Tomcat and Trinity lines.

What garnered Tyan the most attention in recent history was their standing as the first manufacturer to provide a dual processor Athlon MP motherboard - the Thunder K7. Tyan's close cooperation with AMD ensured that they were the only provider of Athlon MP motherboards for several months. Even today, most server manufacturers prefer Tyan's Athlon MP solutions over the Taiwanese competition.

Tyan's experience in the high-end market has given them significant time to market advantages which translate into better boards that hit the market shortly after a chipset is released.

Tyan was a launch partner with Intel's E7500 chipset but today they're introducing another board based on the chipset - the Tiger i7500. Why even bother with a new E7500 solution before Intel finally moves the Xeon platform to the 533MHz FSB? Tyan wanted to continue to hold their ground above the competition with the world's first E7500 board that can be powered by a regular ATX power supply in a standard ATX chassis.

Motherboard Specifications
CPU Interface	Dual Socket-603
Chipset	Intel E7500 MCH Intel ICH3-S Intel P64H2 (PCI-X Bridge)
Bus Speeds	100MHz Quad-Pumped
Core Voltages Supported	N/A
I/O Voltages Supported	N/A
DRAM Voltages Supported	N/A
Memory Slots	4 184-pin DDR DIMM Slots
Expansion Slots	2 64-bit PCI-X Slots 1 32-bit PCI Slot
Onboard RAID	N/A
Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394	N/A
Onboard LAN	Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Intel 8255 10/100 Ethernet
Onboard Audio	N/A

Tyan Tiger i7500: Basic Features

The biggest selling point for the Tiger i7500 is its ATX form factor and support for standard ATX power supplies; this makes the Tiger i7500 the only motherboard available based on Intel's E7500 chipset that will work inside a regular ATX case.

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As we go through the features of the i7500, keep in mind that the board is targeted towards the workstation and server markets; these two markets respond differently to features than the desktop market, which we're used to covering in our motherboard reviews.

The E7500 MCH connects the CPUs to the memory and I/O

As we've already mentioned, the heart and soul of the Tiger i7500 is the Intel E7500 chipset. The E7500 comes to us on the Tyan board through the combination of three chips: the E7500 MCH (Memory & Controller Hub), ICH3-S (I/O Controller Hub) and the P64H2 (PCI-X bridge).

Most of the traces between the two 64-bit DDR memory controllers and the memory banks run below the top layer of the PCB

The E7500 MCH drives the two 603-pin Xeon sockets you see on the Tiger i7500 as well as the four 168-pin DDR SDRAM slots. Remember that the E7500 MCH features a dual-channel DDR memory controller, so memory must be installed in pairs. Tyan is very specific about what sort of configurations may be installed in the Tiger i7500; at bare minimum, identical DIMMs must be installed in two slots but the stipulations extend a little further. If you're populating all four slots, in addition to making sure that you have two sets of equal sized memory modules you also need to make sure that all four DIMMs have the same number of chips. Tyan states that this is to ensure stability regardless of how many memory slots are populated; you'll recall that this is often a problem on desktop motherboards with even three DIMM slots populated.

Since the E7500 MCH is strictly an enterprise class chipset, there's no need for AGP support and thus you won't find an AGP controller in this MCH. The lack of an AGP controller means that the only slots you'll find on the Tiger i7500 are PCI and PCI-X, which leads us to the expansion capabilities of the Tiger i7500. There's a single P64H2 on the motherboard that drives the two 64-bit PCI-X slots on the motherboard. Other than those two PCI-X slots there's only a single 32-bit PCI slot near the end of the motherboard.

This heatsink covers the P64H2 PCI-X bridge

The lack of expansion slots clearly paints the Tiger i7500 as an enterprise class motherboard with limited potential in the workstation market, mostly in areas that aren't dependent on high graphics performance.

The Rage XL provides stable 2D but is worthless for any sort of 3D acceleration

Because of the lack of expansion on the board itself, Tyan has outfitted the Tiger i7500 with as much on-board as possible. To take care of graphics there's the classic ATI RageXL PCI that's found its way on many Tyan boards, including the Thunder K7.

As a server class motherboard, there's a strong focus on networking capabilities which is why you'll find Intel 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet controllers on the Tiger i7500.

Intel's Gigabit Ethernet controller

Unfortunately there was a problem with our review sample, the EEPROM for both network controllers was corrupt and thus we couldn't test the functionality of either network device. Production has already started on the Tiger i7500 with our sample being the first available from Tyan so it's tough to determine whether this is a preproduction board issue or something that Tyan needs to work out now before too many of these boards ship.

We were disappointed that Tyan didn't include any on-board SCSI controllers with the Tiger i7500, especially considering its enterprise target market. The absence of a SCSI controller is mostly to contain cost (the board should retail for under $300) and to maintain the standard ATX form factor.

The ATX form factor of the Tiger i7500 leads us to one of the major selling points of the motherboard - full compatibility with standard Pentium 4 compliant ATX power supplies. Although the motherboard has a set of EPS12V power connectors on it (the EPS spec is used on most newer enterprise class Intel designs), you can also use a standard ATX power supply with the motherboard. The primary EPS power connector is a 24-pin block, while the ATX connector only uses 20 of those pins; the solution is to simply use the rightmost 20 pins of the block as a regular ATX connector and leave the remaining 4 unpopulated. The same goes for the 8-pin EPS12V connector, you only have to use the rightmost 4 pins as a regular ATX12V connector and leave the rest as is.

Board Layout

Cramming a multiprocessor motherboard design into a standard ATX form factor is not an easy task at all, which is why the layout of the Tiger i7500 is generally quite cramped.

If you plan on using the board in a rackmount chassis you should be just fine; the CPU sockets are located towards the back end of the board, which is where most rackmount cases have cooling accommodations setup.

The source for most of our complaints was in regards to the positioning of the CPU sockets and the capacitors around them. Some Xeon cooling setups have fans mounted on the side of the heatsink, instead of on top. This poses a problem with the Tiger i7500 since the capacitors on either side of the CPU sockets prevent pretty much anything from latching onto the sides, which happens to be the case with most of these types of coolers.

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Again, this is only a problem if you're using side-vented heatsink/fan units on your processors; if you're fan is mounted on top of the heatsink then you'll be just fine.

The Tiger i7500 I/O panel is clearly optimized for a 1U chassis

One of the things you'll notice about the Tiger i7500 is that the board is a perfect candidate for a 1U chassis; slap some low-profile heatsinks on the CPUs and stick the board in a chassis with a good blower and you've got yourself a powerful 1U server based on the E7500 chipset. There is one caveat however; the Tiger i7500's memory slots are not angled, and thus most DIMMs will stick up too high to be used in a 1U rack. Tyan's solution was to offer another version of the board, called the S2722-1U (the Tiger i7500 is also known as the S2722). The only difference between the two boards is that the 1U version only has two DIMM slots as they are mounted at a 45 degree angle.

The two 12V power connectors are somewhat difficult to access

Despite the cramped layout of the motherboard the majority of it is very easy to access, including the clear CMOS jumper and IDE connectors. The only things that may be difficult to access are the ATX/EPS12V and auxillary 12V power connectors adjacent to the first PCI-X slot.

BIOS & Stressing the Board

Since the Tiger i7500 is a enterprise class motherboard, there are no overclocking or tweaking options in its AMI BIOS setup. You can adjust the multiplier of your CPUs but since all retail/OEM Xeons ship multiplier locked from the factory, this feature won't get much use.

You can also see that the CPU configuration page offers the ability to enable/disable Hyper-Threading.

The rest of the BIOS is fairly simple, with no options to tweak memory timings; again, remember that the primary goal of this motherboard isn't to be the fastest E7500 solution out there but the most stable.

This is the extent of the configuration of the Tiger i7500's on-board devices:

With the strong focus on I/O performance and configuration in the enterprise market, it's no surprise that the majority of configuration options are related to the PCI/PCI-X buses:

Remote access to the system (BIOS included) can be configured as well:

We stress tested the Tyan Tiger i7500 by running through our usual set of desktop stress test applications including Prime95 for multiple hours on end. In addition to our usual desktop tests, we also ran hours of SQL transaction traces on the testbed in an attempt to bring the motherboard to its knees. As you can expect, we encountered no crashes or any sort of stability issues with the Tiger i7500; with every single one of the AnandTech webservers running off of a Tyan motherboard, we're not too surprised.

The Test

The only two E7500 motherboards we had for this comparison were both made by Tyan - the Tiger i7500 and the Thunder i7500. The two perform identically, thus severely limiting our performance comparison. However in order to give you an idea of what sort of performance to expect from this platform, we've updated our transactional database server tests with scores from the new 2.80GHz Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading enabled on the Tyan Tiger i7500 (we're in the process of updating our Forums DB performance test so the scores are absent from this review).

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	Intel Xeon 2.80GHz x 2
RAM:	2048MB DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive(s):	Western Digital 120GB 7200 RPM Special Edition (8MB Buffer) 2 x Seagate Cheetah X15 15,000RPM SCSI Drives
Bus Master Drivers:	Intel Chipset Drivers
Video Card(s):	ATI RageXL (on-board)
Video Drivers:	Windows 2000 Default
Operation System(s):	Windows 2000 Server
BIOS Version	1.00

We also rounded up the Tiger i7500 and its closest chipset competitor, ServerWorks' GE-HE and compared memory bandwidth figures using Stream:

Memory Bandwidth Comparison - STREAM
	Tyan Tiger i7500	ServerWorks GC-HE Reference Board
Copy	1013.7 MB/s	1242.4 MB/s
Scale	986.4 MB/s	1232.7 MB/s
Add	1105.5 MB/s	1302.2 MB/s
Triad	1104.2 MB/s	1292.6 MB/s
Average:	1052.5 MB/s	1267.5 MB/s

As you can see, the E7500 isn't able to provide as much memory bandwidth as the GC chipsets even though both solutions are using dual channel DDR memory controllers. For most ultra high-end enterprise applications, the E7500 cannot compete with the ServerWorks solutions because of the need for quad channel DDR (the GC-HE also supports quad-channel DDR) memory and higher bandwidth PCI-X bridges. For the entry-level to midrange segment however, the E7500 does stand a chance.

Now let's finish things off with a quick look at how the 2.80GHz Xeon improves performance over the 2.40GHz parts we last tested in our home brewed DB server tests:

Final Words

As an E7500 motherboard, the Tiger i7500 does not disappoint. Just like most other Tyan motherboards, the solution is stable and clearly tailored for the chipset's applications (in this case, the enterprise market).

The big selling point of the Tiger i7500 is its ATX form factor and ability to run off of a standard ATX power supply, which would make the motherboard an excellent choice for the workstation market. Since Intel won't validate the Pentium 4 for use in multiprocessor systems, a dual Xeon setup using the Tiger i7500 would be the best price/performance ratio out of any Intel solution for the workstation market. Unfortunately, the lack of AGP support in the E7500 chipset will limit the success of the Tiger i7500 in this market. In essence, what we're seeing with this board is a preview of what Tyan will be able to deliver with the forthcoming Granite Bay chipset (basically E7500 + AGP 8X support) for the workstation guys. A sub-$300 Granite Bay based board, relatively similar to the Tiger i7500 would be the perfect affordable Xeon platform.

The layout and design of the Tiger i7500 make it perfect for the server market; it's clear, especially with the introduction of the 1U version, that Tyan had this segment in mind when developing the board. The small form factor (relative to most E7500 server boards) will result in an easier time cooling the system for 1U server manufacturers as well as pave the way for Racksaver sized servers that aren't as deep as conventional 1U solutions. Our only gripe on the server end is the lack of any on-board SCSI controller, which may be difficult to implement because of the scarce amount of space left on the cramped PCB.

All in all the Tiger i7500 is another solid production from Tyan, although its use will obviously be very niche oriented. If you find yourself in a niche that would best be filled by an ATX form factor E7500, not only is the Tiger i7500 a good choice but it's the only choice.