Tyan Thunder i7500 S2720 Dual Xeon Motherboard $114

[Zim]

Tyan Thunder i7500 S2720 Dual Xeon Motherboard $114 LINK
FULL SPECS
Review HERE.

1.7GHz Xeons for $59 a piece HERE

 

[Lurker1]

Do note that this Mobo takes an EPS12V special PS only.

 

[Titan]

What's the overclocking potential of this board?

I know tyan rarely allows for any OC features, but could you crank the fsb to 533 on a 400 CPU? The doc only states "400mhz fsb support"

 

[Tylanner]

Do these Xeon's overclock like the 1.6's that were up here earlier?

 

[trevor2k]

These Xeons, according to the person I spoke with on the phone, have only 256kb L2 cache, so they seem to be different than the 1.6's that had 512. Also, according to this page these are without hyper-threading.

 

[hytek369]

Originally posted by: trevor2k
These Xeons, according to the person I spoke with on the phone, have only 256kb L2 cache, so they seem to be different than the 1.6's that had 512. Also, according to this page these are without hyper-threading.

so, the crappy ones. disappointing

 

[Richardito]

Originally posted by: Lurker1
Do note that this Mobo takes an EPS12V special PS only.

That is easily solved via a $9 adapter, so you can use a regular power supply.

 

[Stefan2000]

The 1.7Ghz xeons are Foster DPs. Those are the older Xeons that feature only 256Kb L2 cache and do not feature hyperthreading technology. These may work in this board. However they may not run at their full speed. You see xeons actually have their multiplier unlocked downward (meaning they can be set to a lower multiplier but nt higher). The older Foster core Xeons would initially run at only 800Mhz (with the lowest multiplier available) after first being powered up. The motherboard and it's bios had to set the multipler of the chips to get them to run at their correct speed. When the newer prestonia Xeons were introduced (with hyperthreading and 512KB L2 Cache), this was changed a bit. The multipliers were still unlocked downward and can be changed downward by the motherboard and it's bios. However, the Prestonias and later Xeons run at their correct multiplier after initial power on. Therefore the bios of some boards made to run only Prestonia Xeons never bothers to set the multiplier since it should already be running at the correct mutiplier. A motherboard that does this would only run the Foster Xeons at 800Mhz. Also, if I'm not mistaken a slightly different method of setting the multiplier may be used.
This is what the intel datasheet for Prestonias has to say.

Unlike previous Intel® Xeon? processors, the Intel Xeon processor with 512 KB L2 cache does
not sample the pins IGNNE#, LINT[0]/INTR, LINT[1]/NMI, and A20M# to establish the core to
system bus ratio. Rather, the processor runs at its tested frequency at initial power-on. If the
processor needs to run at a lower core frequency, as must be done when a higher speed processor is
added to a system that contains a lower frequency processor, the system BIOS is able to effect the
change in the core to system bus ratio.

Since all the documentation for this particular board only refers to Xeons with 512KB L2 cache, my guess is this board only officially supports them and may not be able to set the multiplier on older Foster Xeons. Therefore even if the Foster Xeons did work in the board they may only run at 800Mhz and would likely perform very poorly. So, if you were going to use this board youd likely want to spend a bit more on a couple of prestonias

What's the overclocking potential of this board?

None! It's a server board. Server boards aren't usually bought for their overclocking potential. Stability is more important. Also note there's no AGP slot. You don't generally need an AGP slot on a server board thus they generally use chipsets that have no AGP support like the E7500 chipset this board uses.

I know tyan rarely allows for any OC features, but could you crank the fsb to 533 on a 400 CPU? The doc only states "400mhz fsb support"

Nope! For that you need a board based on the E7501 chipset which is the same as the E7500 used on this board but with added support for 533Mhz FSB. Also the E7501 boards will be socket 604 as opposed to socket 603 because all of the 533Mhz FSB Xeons are socket 604. So this board being socket 603 and based on E7500 which only supports 400Mhz FSB will likely not support 533Mhz FSB. Again this is not an "overclockers board".

 

[linuxthinker]

I am skeptical that the 1.7GHZ CPUs will work. http://www.tyan.com/support/html/cpu_xeon_p4.html says that this board only officially supports 1.8-3GHz Xeons. I run this board with 2.4GHZ xeons just fine, though.