ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Tyan: the King of Server Boards

Tyan has a very bright history for making impressive workstation/server class motherboards and when armed with the HEsl chipset they produced yet another goliath of a motherboard.

The Tyan Thunder HEsl was the motherboard we used to represent the ServerSet III HEsl in the comparison and as you can tell by its picture, it's quite feature filled. Like previous members of Tyan's Thunder line, the Thunder HEsl comes with on-board SCSI, LAN and sound.

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The board did have a few quirks, one being that Tyan didn't seem to follow ServerWorks' DIMM layout specifications properly as there are issues regarding which DIMM slots you install memory in if you're only using two (remember you must install DIMMs in pairs). When we installed DIMMs in two of the memory slots in a supported configuration indicated by the manual, the system would no longer boot into Windows 2000, simply choosing the remaining set of DIMM slots remedied the situation. There were no problems with all four DIMMs populated which was how we tested.