6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Expensive, but full featured
Date of Review: Apr 19, 2004
The Bottom Line: If you need speed and features, this is the one. If you need PCI slots, perhaps not.
If you want a dual-Opteron system for a workstation, and you need AGP graphics this is worth looking at. My system has dual Opteron 240s with 2Gb DDR400Mhz memory, and two SATA Raptor 76Gb disks. I chose this board as the MSI offerings seemed to lack a few features this board has. However, you have to pay for the extras.
The first thing to note is the size: this is eATX (12"x13") so make sure your case can take it - most desktop cases only go upto ATX. Second, make sure you have EPS12V PSU - I used a 550W PSU as I planned to add lots of disks.
Setting up the board was simple enough, although a LOT of force is required to get the Opteron heatsinks in place (not Tyan's fault - these are AMD h/sinks). It's got LOTS of memory space - eight DIMM slots means 16GB is possible. Tyan states that DDR400MHz (PC3200) is supported on Opteron 246 and later CPUs, although I bought this for my two 240s and it seems stable. If you are in doubt, go for PC2700.
One downside you may need to consider is the single PCI slot: the other four are PCI-X cards which are not plentiful. Another minus is that they added USB1.1 and not USB2. I've used my only PCI slot with a USB2 card. Another annoyance was the pins for case LEDs did not seem to match my cases' (a Lian PC70).
Back to the good: the Silicon 3114 4-channel SATA RAID is excellent - easy to set up, and very fast (especially with twin Raptors).
