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Tyan Transport GT20 (B2865) Review |
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More Than Expected... |
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by Josh Walrath |
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Tomcat K8E This nForce 4 Ultra based motherboard was built from the ground up to be a budget server board. It features polymer capacitors throughout the design, which have been shown to have a longer lifespan and handle heat a lot better than electrolytic based capacitors. It also does not feature many of the bells and whistles of typical nForce 4 Ultra boards (no sound, extra SATA controllers, Firewire, etc.).
The accessories are quite a bit more than I was expecting. Included are manuals, driver CD's, spare PCI adapter, floppy mounting kit, IPMI mounting hardware, and a pair of really nice rails and mounting gear. It has 4 SATA-II ports that are supported by the nForce 4 chipset. These can be configured into RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. RAID 5 is much more processor intensive though, and often is significantly slower than other standalone cards in read and write speeds. With SATA drives becoming as cheap as they are, 2 x 750 GB drives can be used in mirroring mode, and still give most servers more than enough drive space to work with. Because of the four hot-swappable drive bays and inexpensive hard drives, RAID 10 is a much more attractive option if a user needs performance as well as redundancy.
Tyan included comprehensive manuals for both the motherboard and the chassis. All of my basic questions were answered with these references. The quick setup guide is also quite invaluable. The board has two Gig-E connections provided by both the Broadcom BCM5721 PCI-E controller and the integrated nForce 4 Gig-E MAC with the Marvell 88E1111-CAA physical layer chip. The Broadcom chip is much more supported in the open source community than the NVIDIA controller, mainly due to NVIDIA keeping the internal workings of their implementation locked up. For those using FreeBSD, it is supported under the latest 6.1 stable, but its performance is not as good as the Broadcom solution. Since the Broadcom chip is also on the PCI-E bus, it does not suffer from performance degradation by being on the old PCI bus.
The Tomcat K8E is the heart of the Transport GT20, and it has proven to be an impressive board in its own right. For a barebones product, it has an outstanding featureset and quick performance. ATI’s RageXL with 8 MB of local memory is the onboard video processor, and is natively supported in the vast majority of operating systems, and no external drivers are needed. The 2D performance of this chip is dismal, so do not expect to use this board as an inexpensive workstation product. In Windows with multiple applications open, the graphics performance simply slows to a crawl. Moving pictures, windows, or running video is an eminently frustrating endeavor. If only the basic menus and applications are used, the RageXL does fine. In Terminal Services mode though, this is not an issue.
The copper cooler is actually very large. The black portion is a shroud to funnel the air from the fans through the heatsink. In use it was always cool to the touch. In a 1U chassis, this board can be fitted with riser cards that will give either one PCI-E 16X slot, or one PCI slot. This allows users to utilize a wide variety of peripherals, from PCI-E video cards to RAID controllers to a third Gig-E or a fiber card. With both PCI-E and PCI supported, the possibilities are nearly unlimited. Due to the chassis design though, it is limited to either one or the other and not both. In a bind, an individual can use a mini-PCI card when combined with a smaller PCI-E card, but that would require a bit of metalwork and luck on the user’s part.
Here is another view of the copper heatsink. The fins are skivved, and the bottom is decently polished. The mounting mechanism is simple, yet effective. It snugs right up to the CPU and doesn't let go. The board also supports server management with hardware monitoring, with the option of adding the Tyan SMDC kit which is IPMI 1.5 compliant. Overall the Tomcat K8E is a very well built board, and on the open market it fetches around $200 US due to the choice of components and its design focus. Something of potential interest is that this board supports overclocking. Yes, Tyan has actually enabled overclocking features into their server class boards, and it is fully nTune compliant. In testing this board it could easily achieve 250 MHz HTT with a 4X multiplier. With the test X2 3800+ I was able to run fairly stable at 2.5 GHz, but I would exhibit errors now and again. I found the sweetspot to be 240 HTT with 4X multiplier for the bus, with the X2 3800 running at a cool 2.4 GHz. The only problem with this board is that it does not support CPU multiplier changes. This does limit overclocking by adjusting only the HTT bus, and not a combination of HTT and multipliers.
The rack is not all that deep compared to other products, and the quick installation guide covers all of the basics of getting the server up and running. Memory support could be a big sticking point for this setup. It only supports up to 4 GB of PC3200 DDR un-buffered memory, and in this age of 64 bit operating systems and supporting a maximum of 16 GB per processor that 4 GB number is a little small. For the average or small business server, 2 to 4 GB of main memory is typically plenty. Considering the price point this product is aimed at, it will handle the needs of consumers looking at this range of products. For our use as an email server for 150 employees running FreeBSD 6.1, 2 GB is more than enough to handle our needs. Enough about the board though, let’s get onto the nifty stuff!
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