TYAN 3870G2NR

[Freddie Cash]

On Sat, August 26, 2006 6:10 am, Klaus-Peter Meier wrote:
> has anybody had experience running FreeBSD on TYAN 3870G2NR? If so,
> any issues?

I don't have any experience with that particular board (and tend to
ignore all nVidia-based boards due to spotty support in FreeBSD and
Linux), but have had great success with non-nVidia boards from Tyan.

> Or does anybody have a recommendation?
> Requirements:
> - dual AMD Opteron (dual-core)
> - SATA
> - dual-channel-support
> - Gigabit LAN
> - (nvidia chipset or other new)
> - (onboard graphics controller)

The Tyan Thunder K8S-series of boards (K8S, K8SD, K8SD-Pro) are very
nice server boards.  These are all listsed as S2882 boards on the Tyan
website.  They support:
 - dual-core Opteron CPUs (for the K8SD/S2882D boards)
 - dual-CPU slots (we've used up to 2 GHz Opterons)
 - 8 RAM slots for up to 16 GB ECC RAM
 - onboard SATA/RAID using an SiI chipset (we disable it on our boards)
 - onboard dual-channel Ultra320 wide SCSI using an Adaptec chipset
(we disable it on our boards)
 - dual-Gigabit Ethernet using Broadcom chipsets
 - 10/100 Ethernet using Intel chipset
 - System Management Daughter Card of out-of-band management (M3289,
sold separately, beautiful little card, highly recommended)
 - onboard Ati RageXL 8MB AGP graphics
 - AMD 8xxx and VIA core logic chipsets, fully supported under FreeBSD
and Linux (2.4 and 2.6 kernels)
 - 1 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slot
 - 2 64-bit/100 MHz PCI-X slots
 - 1 64-bit/133 MHz PCI-X slot (2 separate PCI-X buses)
 - 6 USB 1.1 ports (haven't checked if it supports USB 2.0 yet)

All hardware and chipsets are fully supported (except SATA RAID) in
FreeBSD 6.0+ and Debian Linux testing (2.4 and 2.6 kernels).

We've got these in a bunch of tower cases in our elementary and
secondary schools, and in a shwackload of 2U and 5U rackmount servers.
 We use 3Ware Escalade 9550SX SATA RAID controllers in all these
systems so I do not know how well/poorly the onboard SATA/SCSI works
(the controllers are detected correctly in FreeBSD and Linux) but the
SATA RAID is a fake/pseudo/hybrid RAID, not true hardware RAID.

Beautiful boards, and seemingly very popular, as it's quite hard to
get a steady supply of them up here in Canada.  They also come in
lead-free versions, although the model numbers are different (same
chipsets and features, though), if that matters in your area.

We have not had any problems with our S2882 boards.  Some of our early
test boards were Thunder K8SR (S2881) boards, and those were not a lot
of fun to get working.

----
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net