Tyan Tiger i7500: E7500 meets ATX

Tyan Tiger i7500: Basic Features

The biggest selling point for the Tiger i7500 is its ATX form factor and support for standard ATX power supplies; this makes the Tiger i7500 the only motherboard available based on Intel's E7500 chipset that will work inside a regular ATX case.

Click to Enlarge

As we go through the features of the i7500, keep in mind that the board is targeted towards the workstation and server markets; these two markets respond differently to features than the desktop market, which we're used to covering in our motherboard reviews.

The E7500 MCH connects the CPUs to the memory and I/O

As we've already mentioned, the heart and soul of the Tiger i7500 is the Intel E7500 chipset. The E7500 comes to us on the Tyan board through the combination of three chips: the E7500 MCH (Memory & Controller Hub), ICH3-S (I/O Controller Hub) and the P64H2 (PCI-X bridge).

Most of the traces between the two 64-bit DDR memory controllers and the memory banks run below the top layer of the PCB

The E7500 MCH drives the two 603-pin Xeon sockets you see on the Tiger i7500 as well as the four 168-pin DDR SDRAM slots. Remember that the E7500 MCH features a dual-channel DDR memory controller, so memory must be installed in pairs. Tyan is very specific about what sort of configurations may be installed in the Tiger i7500; at bare minimum, identical DIMMs must be installed in two slots but the stipulations extend a little further. If you're populating all four slots, in addition to making sure that you have two sets of equal sized memory modules you also need to make sure that all four DIMMs have the same number of chips. Tyan states that this is to ensure stability regardless of how many memory slots are populated; you'll recall that this is often a problem on desktop motherboards with even three DIMM slots populated.