Tyan S2915 n6650W & S2927 n3600B
The Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927) motherboard with its dual Socket F CPU sockets compiles with the ATX form factor specifications (compared to the S2915 having an SSI / Extended ATX foot-print), so the components are a bit more crammed on the 12 by 13 inch PCB, but it's not too bad. For each CPU socket there are four DDR2 ECC Registered DIMM slots that support single, dual, and quad rank memory. The power requirements for this motherboard include the 24-pin and 8-pin connections along with a 4-pin molex connector at the bottom of this motherboard while the S2915 requires the 24-pin and 8-pin connections from an SSI PSU plus a 4-pin +12V connector as well. Both the 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors on the Thunder n3600B are located along the top edge of the motherboard, which makes it convenient for traditional enclosures with a power supply mounted along the upper edge of the motherboard.
Below the first CPU socket is the NVIDIA nForce 3600 PRO Chipset that is cooled by a passive, aluminum heatsink. Next to that chipset that is popular to Tyan's AMD Opteron 2000 series motherboards are six Serial ATA 2.0 ports. There are also three 4-pin fan connectors located in this area of the motherboard. Located further down on this motherboard is a single IDE connector, the BIOS chip, a port 80 display code indicator, integrated reset and power switches, two USB 2.0 headers, two IEEE-1394a Firewire headers, and the FDD connector. There are also SMSC SCH5017 and VIA VT6307/6308 Firewire ASICs in this area.
There are two PCI Express x16 and four standard PCI slots on the Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927). There are no PCI-X slots and the second PCI Express x16 slot is limited to PCI-E x8 bandwidth, but that is due to constraints of the NVIDIA chipset. Immediately above the first PCI Express x16 slot are the four DDR2 RAM slots for the second CPU.
The I/O panel ports for the Tyan S2927 are two PS/2, one COM, VGA output, three audio jacks for HD audio, four USB 2.0 ports, and two Gigabit Ethernet. In regards to the S2927 there are the S2927G2NR and S2927A2NRF SKUs. The S2927A2NRF is the model that we are reviewing and differing it from the other model is the integrated audio support, IEEE-1394 Firewire support, and the integrated graphics provided by an XGI Volari Z7 controller.