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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 6 of 7
Installation and Testing:
For testing of the Tyan K8SE (S2892) motherboard, we used the following hardware:
Enclosure: iStarUSA D-300L-M6 Rackmount Case
Power Supply: iStarUSA TC-3U46
Processor: 2 x AMD Opteron 242’s at 1.6ghz
Motherboard: Tyan K8SE (S2892)
Memory: Crucial 2 x 2gig kits (2 x 1gig) DDR400 PC-3200
Video: Integrated
Storage: 2 x Western Digital RE 250gig SATA2 in RAID0
Optical: Sony Slimline DVD-RW/CD-RW PATA
Installation of the Tyan K8SE was fairly straight forward. Since the K8SE is an EATX board, it fit nice and snug in our iStarUSA chassis. As previously stated, there is not much room between the CPU cooler’s retention bracket and the DIMM slots. Below are some pictures showing just how close these are using some Silverstone NT05’s and our Crucial memory.
  
As for the software side of things, the only real issue we had was with a memory setting in the BIOS. The four gigs of Crucial memory that was installed would be recognized anywhere between one and three gigs, never a complete four gigs. Once the setting was corrected with the help of Tyan’s excellent telephone support, all four gigs of memory were recognized.
A special side note having to do with the nForce Professional 2200 RAID BIOS: As stated on the Tyan website, the Tyan K8SE motherboard only supports RAID 0, 1 and 1+0. Upon constructing the RAID array, the nForce BIOS gives you the option for RAID5! At this point, the feature works and the array builds and sees itself as a RAID5 array. Attempting to install anything to this array will result in failure. Contacting Tyan’s telephone support, the friendly technician on the phone put me on hold, researched with somebody else and found out that the latest version of the nForce BIOS on these boards does have RAID5 capabilities. Since the motherboard does not support RAID5, this will obviously not work. As far as Tyan relayed to us, nVidia and Tyan are both working to get this issue resolved, but as of review, no BIOS updates were available and they are still working on the issue. This issue is really no big deal but worth noting before spending an hour trying to get a RAID5 array to work.
The Tyan K8SE was tested with both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux, both not having any problems upon installation with Windows simply taking a floppy disc for RAID drivers for the RAID-0 utilizing the nForce Professional 2200 chipset. We did not have enough time to test this board with RAID on Linux. What we can tell you is that with both Live and Alternative installation discs from Ubuntu 6.10, the RAID array was recognized but was fidgety during installation at best. I would assume that through rebuilding a Linux kernel with proper drivers, the system should boot fine.
Results:
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Motherboards 
