No Gripe Line recently wrote about a frustrating - and time-consuming - experience with the Tyan motherboard. "I had heard only good things Tyan," he says. So he and his colleagues enthusiastically devoted to the construction of some servers using these motherboards.

It all started well. "We have built three servers using the Tyan S4980 motherboard," says Don. "Two of them have 4x AMD Opteron 8354 quad-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM. One has a 2x AMD Opteron 8346 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM. All RAM being used on KVR667D2D4P5 Kingston 4GB sticks. And these servers have 6x WD green 1TB hard drives. " These three servers was very good.

For the next batch of server, though, Don and his colleagues were more ambitious. "We wanted to build five servers with 4x AMD Opteron 8380 AMD CPUs with 64GB of RAM each." S4980 motherboard, which uses the first time - on servers that was so good - did not support this CPU. "So we were a bit bigger: The Tyan S4985. And here is where the problems began."

The first problem was finding a vendor who had stock in this motherboard. Which proved quite difficult. "Maybe that was a sign of things to come," says Don, "but not see it that way." Bought out the inventory of an online store and had two more Tyan drop ship from another dealer. Then they got busy building servers. "But we could not get any of these motherboards to boot the first time," he says. "After several hours, just wasting time, we discovered that the installation of a retailer and in 8380 a two sockets, and in 8380 a three-and four OEM sockets worked."
It seems as if these servers are fine - for a while. "Within a few weeks, however, the motherboard did not start," says Don. "The first, although not yet in the VAR of the return period, so it easily returned it. The next bit after a failure. We had to return to a Tyan.

Confirmed the Tyan motherboard was dead and sent a substitute. This was very annoying, says Don. "But what we sent as a replacement was frankly disturbing."
"It was packed in the same box that sent the dead into the motherboard, which is no big deal. But not a sealed container. So the board was not secured." Don cautiously opened the box and found things were worse on the inside.

"The mother was packed in a bag that had lots of tears and holes. We pulled the board and discovered that most of the labels are peeling and all connectors are yellowish. It also appears to have water damage on the bottom , near the waste outlet, a blob of solder in one of the supports CPU and the thermal compound on the CPU retention, "he says.
Tyan immediately contacted Don and asked if this motherboard has been tested before leaving Tyan. He said there was. "I was told that he had passed the" test of Linux. " Not reassuring, but with few options, Don spent an hour and prepare for installation of the plate. "I'm not surprised to find that it was DOA," he says. Shortly after the mother returned, two more of the ambitious five servers with this motherboard is not well.

Nothing like having to take the end result, apart from the return and - repeatedly - to steal a team of his enthusiasm for a project. "So thanks for letting me vent," says Don.