Tyan Tiger i7500: E7500 meets ATX

Since the E7500 MCH is strictly an enterprise class chipset, there's no need for AGP support and thus you won't find an AGP controller in this MCH. The lack of an AGP controller means that the only slots you'll find on the Tiger i7500 are PCI and PCI-X, which leads us to the expansion capabilities of the Tiger i7500. There's a single P64H2 on the motherboard that drives the two 64-bit PCI-X slots on the motherboard. Other than those two PCI-X slots there's only a single 32-bit PCI slot near the end of the motherboard.

This heatsink covers the P64H2 PCI-X bridge

The lack of expansion slots clearly paints the Tiger i7500 as an enterprise class motherboard with limited potential in the workstation market, mostly in areas that aren't dependent on high graphics performance.

The Rage XL provides stable 2D but is worthless for any sort of 3D acceleration

Because of the lack of expansion on the board itself, Tyan has outfitted the Tiger i7500 with as much on-board as possible. To take care of graphics there's the classic ATI RageXL PCI that's found its way on many Tyan boards, including the Thunder K7.

As a server class motherboard, there's a strong focus on networking capabilities which is why you'll find Intel 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet controllers on the Tiger i7500.

Intel's Gigabit Ethernet controller

Unfortunately there was a problem with our review sample, the EEPROM for both network controllers was corrupt and thus we couldn't test the functionality of either network device. Production has already started on the Tiger i7500 with our sample being the first available from Tyan so it's tough to determine whether this is a preproduction board issue or something that Tyan needs to work out now before too many of these boards ship.

We were disappointed that Tyan didn't include any on-board SCSI controllers with the Tiger i7500, especially considering its enterprise target market. The absence of a SCSI controller is mostly to contain cost (the board should retail for under $300) and to maintain the standard ATX form factor.

The ATX form factor of the Tiger i7500 leads us to one of the major selling points of the motherboard - full compatibility with standard Pentium 4 compliant ATX power supplies. Although the motherboard has a set of EPS12V power connectors on it (the EPS spec is used on most newer enterprise class Intel designs), you can also use a standard ATX power supply with the motherboard. The primary EPS power connector is a 24-pin block, while the ATX connector only uses 20 of those pins; the solution is to simply use the rightmost 20 pins of the block as a regular ATX connector and leave the remaining 4 unpopulated. The same goes for the 8-pin EPS12V connector, you only have to use the rightmost 4 pins as a regular ATX12V connector and leave the rest as is.