For those who need the power of
a dually Xeon for your applications, but are still on a budget and can't afford
a ESP12V power supply, there is an alternate solution.
The Tyan
Tiger S2722 draws power as any standard server board would from a 24-pin & 8-pin set of EPS12V power connectors. However, the Tiger
S2722 is versatile and will also run off of a high quality standard Pentium 4 compatible ATX12V
power supply with at least one free molex connector.
We tested this
out by selecting a 470W ATX power supply and connecting the 20-pin power connector to the
24-pin socket on the S2722, the 4-pin auxiliary power connect to the 8-pin connector on
the board, and the molex power connector to its socket as well. The board isn't keyed specifically for this method, so reference
the manual before plugging in any cables from the ATX12V PSU.
After
power up, the Tiger 2722 ran just fine as expected, though we caution you to only
use a high quality power supply if this is the route you decide. In general
terms, ESP12V power supplies are not as mass produced as ATX12V PSU's which can be made very cheap, and very unreliable. Don't take the chance and allow
data to get corrupted thanks to a lousy power source.
The layout
of the Tiger S2722 is quite different from most
desktop motherboards even though it is ATX compliant (in size and
power). The twin Xeon CPU sockets are located at the upper
right hand corner of the board, with no obstructions close by. When installed in an
appropriate 1U or 2U rack mountable case with internal case fans, this position can provide
a level of redundancy should a fan fail on one of the processors
(system air flow can help to keep temperatures
down).
This depends on the particulars
of the case of course, and in any event there is good clearance around
each of the processor sockets for standard active cooling heatsinks when chassis space
allows.
Headers,
sockets and DIMM's are well labelled on the board, so for example if you're
not sure which two sets of DIMM constitute a pair, just look for the label
- beats checking the
manual!
The Tiger S2722's six fan headers are all well
located and easy to access. The floppy and IDE connectors are in a good
location as well. There shouldn't really be any problems installing full
length PCI peripherals on this board whether it be in a 1U or 4U chassis.
Server devices such as RAID cards are usually very long, so this can be an
important point to dwell on, even
if momentarily.
You may have noticed as well that the Tyan Tiger S2722 does not have
any onboard SCSI options. There are two reasons for this, first SCSI controllers are expensive and
would simply add to the price of the board. Secondly, given the small footprint
of this entry level sever board it really isn't necessary.
In most situations, the the Tiger S2722
would find its use as a Web/Application server where it can be run just fine
with IDE hard drives. Those that decide they truly need
the extra data redundancy can install a standalone 64-bit PCI-X RAID card.
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