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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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Benchmark Results Tomcat K8E Athlon 64 3800+ at 2.0 GHz and 2.4 GHz 2 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (2:3:2:7 timings) 2 x Seagate 7800.9 250 GB 7200 SATA Hard Drives in RAID 1 Toshiba DVD-ROM Leadtek GeForce 7800 GTX SoundBlaster Audigy Windows XP 64 Professional NVIDIA 91.31 Graphics 64 bit drivers NVIDIA 6.86 nForce for AMD 64 bit drivers
This is a straight shot looking into the drive bays. Standard drives have no problem fitting into these spaces, and everything lines up perfectly so hot swapping drives is not an issue. I tested the motherboard outside of the 1U chassis so I can disable the onboard video and use a much more powerful video card. The board does not include onboard audio. I utilized a series of benchmarks to try to paint a picture of the motherboards performance, but much of the performance is simply related to the processor used. No issues were uncovered throughout extended use, and BIOS support has been very good throughout the past year.
The drive cages themselves are very simple, yet sturdy. The locking mechanism could use some improvement, but in regular use I never had an issue with it. Results SiSoft Sandra 2007
These results are very typical of an Athlon X2 3800+ with good memory. The drives in RAID 1 did very, very well. The average throughput was very impressive. HD Tach 3.0
Upon closer inspection we see rates hit upwards of 120 MB/sec with minimal CPU impact. An average of 100 MB/sec is very good for those looking for inexpensive drives to power their machine. Newer drives like the 7800.10 from Seagate are even faster. Sciencemark 2.0
The 939 X2’s do not have the best memory performance out of the entire stable of products, and this does improve greatly with the Rev. F K8’s. Still, it is not a slouch considering that a X2 3800+ can be had for less than $150 these days. Dual core helps out a lot with the Mol Dyn and Primordia benchmarks. A single core Winchester based Athlon 64 3200+ completes Mol Dyn in 94.04 seconds and Primordia in 438.36 seconds.
This is a shot of the PCI-E riser and mounting plate. Note the 90 degree riser attached to an extension. This enables the use of both a PCI-E card or a PCI without resorting to extreme metalwork on the chassis to make the cards fit. Overclocking The HTT bus goes up to 250 MHz in the BIOS, but not a step further. Voltages can be adjusted, but there are no multiplier settings to get to for the CPU. Memory support was excellent, and there are all the necessary settings to adjust timing and ratios to enable the best performance throughout the overclocking range. The board runs fine at 250 MHz, but without multiplier support the user is at the whim of the CPU as to how high it will clock. The sweet spot for the processor I used was 2.4 GHz with standard cooling, which allowed the HTT bus to run at slightly lower than 1 GHz levels, but enabled the memory to run at 200 MHz with the correct divider. Needless to say, it is not terribly appropriate to overclock a production server, but the extra headroom that Tyan includes to tweak the performance gives the end user a bit more flexibility than expected.
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Copyright 1999-2006 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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