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#805 - Tyan K8SE Motherboard |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Monday, 16 April 2007 |
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Page 4 of 7
A Closer Look 1/2:
The Tyan K8SE motherboard comes with a black and white printed user’s manual. This manual was clear and easy to read with enough information to get anybody working with this board. The included layout sticker is very handy especially for servers that are going to be remote and you don’t know who you might have being your remote hands during a system upgrade or repair. We chose to place this sticker directly to the inside of the chassis lid. We actually referred to this layout sticker more than once and ended up being a valued add-in!
 
Taking a look at the K8SE from the top, you can see that this board is fairly large E-ATX motherboard and measures 12” x 13”. You can also see all the features jam packed into this board. Looking at the back of the board, you can practically get lost in all the pin soldering and routes! In the end, everything is fairly well laid out.
  
Starting at the back of the motherboard, we see the I/O area. From left to right you have your keyboard and mouse connections, two USB2.0 slots under a single 10/100mb Ethernet jack from the Intel chipset, a single serial jack, a single VGA jack from the integrated ATI Rage XL chipset and lastly two Gigabit jacks from the Broadcom chipset.
Moving over to the expansion slots from left to right you have one of two PCI-E x16 slots, a single PCI 2.3 slot, the second of the two PCIE x16 slots and then the three PCI-X slots. The green slot designates the slot as a 100/66 MHz PCI-X slot from the PCI-X Bridge B. The two white PCI-X slots are the two 133/100MHz PCI-X Slots from Bridge A. To the right of the slots, you will find the floppy, LPT, and SMDC headers. To me, I would prefer the floppy header to more towards the front of the board where the actual floppy is located. This placement requires a lengthy floppy cable which I can’t honestly say the included cable would reach longer rack mount chassis.
 
Continuing down the side of the motherboard, you find the front panel USB2.0 headers, four SATA2 headers via the nVidia Professional 2200 chipset, activity LED header for the Intel LAN, COM2 header, IDE1 (black) and IDE2 (white) headers and then lastly is the Pheonix Bios Chip. Tucked just above the IDE2 header and to the left of the BIOS chip, you will find the three-pin Chassis Intrusion header and the Front Panel Headers for the power switch etc.
 
Working up to the middle of the board, directly behind the expansion slots, you will find two black heat sinks. The top heat sink covers the nVidia Crush K8-04 Northbridge chip. The bottom heat sink covers the AMD 8121 PCI-X Bridge. Both of these chips can get fairly hot during operation and you will want to make sure to have the best airflow you can in your server case. On opposite side of the expansion slots, you will find the Broadcom and ATI Rage XL chips without heat sinks.
  
 
To the right of the chips mentioned above, you have the Tyan TARO SODIMM Expansion Slot. This can be used for a variety of RAID expansions cards (M9000-10,M8110,M7902,M7901) for adding SATA RAID and SCSI RAID options to the board without the need for a perpendicular expansion card. This is especially useful in 1U and 2U rack mount cases where there is not a lot of room.
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Motherboards 
