Workstation Motherboard

Choosing the ultimate workstation board was a trivial decision – there was never any doubt that the Tyan Thunder K8WE would be the platform of choice. As one of the companies with the most experience producing workstation and server motherboards and a track record of producing some of most reliable products on the market, Tyan was automatically on our short list.

What pushed Tyan ahead of competitors such as Iwill or ASUS was the dual PCIe x16 slots, made possible with two nForce Professional chipsets (both the 2200 and 2050 – you need both CPUs installed). While this makes SLI active only when using two CPUs, this is a non-issue considering the fact that target market will always be building dual CPU systems. It’s things like this that reflect Tyan’s attention detail and development of a system board that meets their customers’ needs rather than just a marketing department. In fact, if you look at our workstation and server build-articles, Tyan products have always ended up with our design win. They are expensive in terms of absolute cost, but their feature list meets this recommendation. Although full-bandwidth PCI express isn’t the limiting factor for games, it’s becomes more important for workstation 3D applications.

The feature list for the Thunder K8WE (S2895) reads like a wish list – it has virtually everything. The basics such as having 8 DIMM slots for NUMA performance, and dual NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet are present, but it’s also has more PCIe bandwidth than any other platform on the market. There are also a 64-bit 133Mhz PCI-X and two 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots to provide support for professional FC or SCSI or 4:4:4 HD video capture add-on cards, and 6 fan headers.

Although the only SATA controller is that from the main NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 chip, an on-board Ultra320 SCSI controller is available that taps into the PCI-X bus. We would have liked an additional 4 SATA-II ports on the second nForce southbridge, there wasn’t physical space on the motherboard (while keeping SCSI)! It would also have also been nice if the K8WE preserved the S/PDIF output that was present on the original K8W. Fortunately, an add-on sound card serves as a reasonable solution although the 4 slots taken up with SLI’d GPUs from NVIDIA makes it tough.

Tyan Thunder K8WE
$565 (non-SCSI)
http://www.tyan.com

Running Total: $2395

Why are dual processor motherboards so expensive?

At initial glance, it seems odd that a dual processor motherboard would cost more than twice the price of two regular motherboards. In fact, dual processor motherboards have always been very expensive due to increased complexity of maintaining all the traces. It’s not a linear increase in complexity or manufacturing costs. Likewise, the chipsets themselves are considerably more complex, and the costs of the plastic CPU sockets themselves are higher too. Considering the amount of engineering that goes into motherboards (both single and dual processor), they are relative bargains and if your usage pattern demands two physical CPUs, the price premium is a small price to pay. If you’re just an enthusiast, the advent of consumer-grade dual-core CPUs is by far the smarter approach. Don’t get a dual Opteron just because you think it’d be cool.