Choosing the motherboard

Dealing with power

We have our CPU. Now we need a motherboard. Before I go on, let me side step a bit and talk about stability. Recall from December’s article that the power supply plays a huge role in stability. For the workstation I was building, I wanted to go with an EPS12V power supply as opposed to ATX12V.

EPS12V is a standard used in high-end XEON and AMD motherboards in which there are three +12V outputs. This provides added stability. Our power supply of choice was the $200 PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 475 XE. Though 475W may not seem like much (our Octane2 features an 800W power supply), the true performance of the 475XE is excellent. The rated specs are:

+5V @ 40A
+12Vio @ 16A
+12Vdig @ 18A
+3.3V @ 45A
+5VSB @ 3.5A
+12Vio/dig<30A
+5 & +3.3V<300W
power@50C<460W
power@40C<510W
peak power <600W

Notice that the power supply is appropriately rated for differing temperatures. The Turbo-Cool is probably one of the best power supplies in its class.

Workstation/Server Motherboard

For our motherboard, we went with the Tyan Thunder K7X Pro. We did this for a few reasons. When it comes to EPS12V based dual AMD systems, Tyan had the most experience of the motherboard manufacturers we considered. Google and Yahoo run on Tyan motherboards. Specifically, the Thunder K7X Pro gave us two on-board Ethernet controllers, one being Gigabit Ethernet. This was important to us since the system may become a node in a larger cluster in the future.