Tyan S2915 n6650W & S2927 n3600B

While we have rarely ever ran into any real hardware troubles with Tyan motherboards since we first started testing them at Phoronix back in 2005, with the S2915 n6650W and S2927 n3600B motherboards we initially had some headaches. The S2927 appeared to be dead on arrival and the S2915 had issues booting Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, and other Linux distributions even when changing out the system components, updating the BIOS, and changing around other variables. Tyan was quick to provide support and ultimately they sent out two new motherboards. Both of these motherboards were fine and we had no problems at all. After testing about two dozen Tyan motherboards before running into any problems, we are not too concerned and Tyan was quick to provide support.

The system hardware we used when testing each motherboard was two AMD Opteron 2384 quad-core "Shanghai" processors clocked at 2.70GHz, 4 x 1GB of Corsair DDR2-667 ECC Registered memory, a Western Digital WD1600YS-01S SATA hard drive, and an ATI FirePro V8750 2GB graphics card. On the software side we were benchmarking with Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) using the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, X Server 1.6.4, fglrx 8.68.2 / OpenGL 3.2.9232, GCC 4.4.1, and the default EXT4 file-system.

Neither of the Tyan motherboards had compatibility problems with Ubuntu 9.10 -- all of the onboard components had worked fine. LM_Sensors also had no problems detecting and utilizing the integrated sensors for voltage, fan speed, and thermal monitoring. To provide some workstation benchmarks on the S2915 n6650W and S2927 n3600B we compared its performance to the previously reviewed Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard that also utilizes the NVIDIA nForce PRO 3600 Chipset. The Phoronix Test Suite was run with the VDrift, PostgreSQL, PostMark, POV-Ray, Gcrypt, John The Ripper, MAFFT, FFmpeg, LZMA compression, Bullet Physics Engine, and NASA NAS Parallel Benchmarks.