Intel's E7500 Chipset: Dual Channel DDR for Xeon

Motherboard Support: Not just Tyan anymore

In the past the vast majority of Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers wouldn't dare come close to touching the high-end server market. Recently, as the desktop market continues to grow more competitive, most Taiwanese firms originally thought of as exclusively desktop board providers are now looking to the high-end server and workstation markets to increase revenues.

There is obviously much less competition in these markets since there are fewer players, but the stakes are also considerably higher. The failure rate of the majority of desktop motherboards we review is simply unacceptable for these high-end markets. Validation processes must also be improved tremendously if these manufacturers are going to be taken seriously in the server market. To get an idea of what manufacturers are announcing support for the E7500 chipset, take a look at Intel's own slide from their E7500/Xeon Server press presentation:

Who would've ever expected to see names like ABIT and QDI alongside Intel's Enterprise Platforms & Services Division, Supermicro and Tyan in a server platform presentation? It's a drastically changing market and those who adapt are those that will succeed but as we've mentioned before, the rules of the game are much different in the server world. Having an on-board IDE RAID controller with compatibility problems or not being able to operate flawlessly with all DIMM slots populated will definitely not fly among the high-spending server customers. While we'll review some of these platforms the true tests of stability and reliability will be unfortunately made outside of our lab once these solutions get into the hands of customers. Let's hope that these E7500 platforms from ABIT, Gigabyte, MSI and QDI come off of a different production line than their desktop motherboards as they will require a much higher degree of care and attention.

Click to Enlarge - Gigabyte's E7500 Board

Should these companies do very well in their volume DP server motherboards then it definitely means trouble for the Tyans and Supermicros of the world that have made their bread and butter almost solely from this market. Then again, it took years of perfection of validation and testing processes to get those two to where they are today and it will take even more effort to compete with them.