Tyan and nVidia

[Buck]

Very nice motherboard:
Thunder K8WE (S2895)
Specifications

 

[ddrueding]

Very nice indeed. I'd say that qualifies as the "ultimate workstation motherboard" to date. Dual Opteron, Dual true 16x PCI-E, PCI-X@133, SATA II.

Drool.

 

[Mercutio]

Disappointing that it's an nforce4.

 

[ddrueding]

Disappointing that it's an nforce4.

I saw that as a plus. Care to elaborate?

 

[Mercutio]

I've had bad experiences with every nforce chipset thusfar. Problems with IDE, or boards being picky WRT RAM. Volume control issues with the MCP, stability problems when nforce2s are paired with XP3200s.

Taken as a whole, the flaws I have seen in the nforce chipsets might be acceptable in an enthusiast board, but I wouldn't sell one in a general-purpose end user system, let along a workstation quality product.

 

[Will Rickards]

If tyan made it I'd probably trust it though.

 

[Handruin]

Anandtech reviews the nForce Professional chipset.

 

[Handruin]

One of the big questions that we first wanted answered was whether or not nForce Pro and nForce 4 Ultra/SLI were the same silicon with different parts turned on/off. NVIDIA maintains that they are different silicon, and it is entirely possible that they are. They did, in fact, give us transistor counts for nForce 4 and nForce Pro:

nForce 4: 22 Million Transistors
nForce Pro: 24 Million Transistors

 

[P5-133XL]

I have to admit as to being impressed with the I/O throughput potential for the Nforce Pro chipsets on a multi-CPU Opteron board.

 

[MaxBurn]

Wow, anyone see a block diagram of that board? I especially like the seperat PCIX busses.

 

[MaxBurn]

Nevermind, found it.

ftp://ftp.tyan.com/datasheets/d_s2895_100.pdf

 

[ddrueding]

Has anyone found them in the channel yet? I'm sure I could find a client that "needs" an upgrade. Some of them are so geeky that me drooling over it justifies the upgrade.

 

[Buck]

I haven't seen any yet. Tyan also has a rackmount version board coming out, plus a i925 based motherboard.

 

[sechs]

Have the chipset and motherboard manufacturers already given up on AGP?

 

[Handruin]

It seems like they have. From a cost standpoint it seems like the right move for them. Why support a PCI & AGP bus when you can take PCIe bus (which supports graphics) and divide the lanes any way you see fit? It doesn't seem useful now due to limited availability of PCIe peripherals, but down the road it makes it easier.

 

[sechs]

Perhaps I was naive in thinking that there would be boards with both AGP and PCI-E graphics slots.

 

[Handruin]

Nope, looks like VIA's KT890 will support both AGP and PCIe:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipsets/display/20041212030218.html

 

[ddrueding]

Nope, looks like VIA's KT890 will support both AGP and PCIe:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipsets/display/20041212030218.html

Though I don't know how many of the MoBo mfgrs will actually implement both...

 

[sechs]

After reading the article, I'm not even sure that this chipset is going to get out of the lab, let alone onto production boards.