Tyan Tiger i7500: E7500 meets ATX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 30, 2002 5:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Board Layout
Cramming a multiprocessor motherboard design into a standard ATX form factor is not an easy task at all, which is why the layout of the Tiger i7500 is generally quite cramped.
If you plan on using the board in a rackmount chassis you should be just fine; the CPU sockets are located towards the back end of the board, which is where most rackmount cases have cooling accommodations setup.
If you're trying to stick this in a desktop ATX case however you're going to have a bit more trouble; the CPU sockets are going to be very close to the hidden 3.5" drive bays in most mid tower ATX cases and conventional Xeon heatsinks aren't exactly low profile. The end result is that a pair of Xeons could block access to the bottom few 3.5" drive bays in your case; the only way around this is to make sure that you're using as large a case as possible if you plan on using the board in anything other than a rack.
The source for most of our complaints was in regards to the positioning of
the CPU sockets and the capacitors around them. Some Xeon cooling setups have
fans mounted on the side of the heatsink, instead of on top. This poses a problem
with the Tiger i7500 since the capacitors on either side of the CPU sockets
prevent pretty much anything from latching onto the sides, which happens to
be the case with most of these types of coolers.
Again, this is only a problem if you're using side-vented heatsink/fan units on your processors; if you're fan is mounted on top of the heatsink then you'll be just fine.
The Tiger i7500 I/O panel is clearly optimized for a 1U chassis
One of the things you'll notice about the Tiger i7500 is that the board is a perfect candidate for a 1U chassis; slap some low-profile heatsinks on the CPUs and stick the board in a chassis with a good blower and you've got yourself a powerful 1U server based on the E7500 chipset. There is one caveat however; the Tiger i7500's memory slots are not angled, and thus most DIMMs will stick up too high to be used in a 1U rack. Tyan's solution was to offer another version of the board, called the S2722-1U (the Tiger i7500 is also known as the S2722). The only difference between the two boards is that the 1U version only has two DIMM slots as they are mounted at a 45 degree angle.
The two 12V power connectors are somewhat difficult to access
Despite the cramped layout of the motherboard the majority of it is very easy to access, including the clear CMOS jumper and IDE connectors. The only things that may be difficult to access are the ATX/EPS12V and auxillary 12V power connectors adjacent to the first PCI-X slot.
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