TYAN S7056WGM3NR-2T (Intel C602) Server Motherboard Review

TYAN's S7056WGM3NR-2T is a full featured server motherboard that is a perfect fit for many different types of servers. Let's see how it performs now.

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Manufacturer: TYAN
9 minutes & 58 seconds read time

Introduction

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Server motherboards can come in all different configurations. The TYAN S7056WGM3NR-2T comes equipped with good network connectivity and storage options onboard, so few extra add-on cards will be required. This is very nice when deciding what motherboard to use for your server. You can pick a board that fits your needs and not have to worry about extra cards to support features that the motherboard does not include.

We did not receive a full barebones kit to do this review--only a motherboard--but this would be a typical 2U barebones kit from TYAN. This is the 2U Barebones GN70-B7056.

TYAN barebones servers and server chassis enclosures provide OEMs and VARs with simplified, cost-effective components and solutions for building robust, feature-rich servers.

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As you can see by looking at the kit, this server is well suited for storage applications and can provide extra connectivity through expansion ports.

Specifications & Layout Details

Specifications

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The main supporting features of this motherboard are its two mini-SAS connectors and one mini SATA connector, which give storage and RAID options right out of the box. The two 10GBase-T LAN connections also supply basic network connectivity and provide the option to install faster network cards into the PCIe busses.

Layout

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The general layout of the S7056WGM3NR-2T is typical for motherboards of this type. CPUs and RAM are located at the front of the board to allow better access to case fans for cooling. The main storage connectors are located at the back of the motherboard, which can give access to storage locations at the front and back of the server without too many issues.

Another difference of this motherboard is the CPU fan header locations. The fan header for CPU #1 is just above and to the right of the socket, while the fan header for CPU #0 is at the far left side at the front of the motherboard.

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The CPU socket area is nice and clean, which will help with airflow and cooling. Please take note that this motherboard uses socket 2011 narrow ILM type coolers.

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We are looking at the rear right side of the motherboard now, and you can see I/O connections at the top. Over on the right edge is the PCH SKU Upgrade ROM Module Header, front fan header, and power connection. There is also a USB Type-A connection with a COM2 Port header next to it.

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Located at the left rear of the motherboard, we find the I/O connections.

Here we see the main storage connections on the S7056WGM3NR-2T. The top two connectors are the mini-SAS, and the mini SATA connections are at the bottom.

The two blue headers on the left edge are for USB expansion. Two blue SATA connectors are right below. Just to the right of the blue SATA connectors is a SATA SGPIO header.

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Looking at the middle left side, we find two blue SATA ports and the front panel header below. The next header is for the LAN3 LEDs.

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Looking at the rear of the motherboard, we find the I/O connections. At the left is two USB connections with the IPMI port at the top. The next stack is VGA output and a COM port at the bottom. The little button is the ID LED button.

The next two LAN connectors allow configuration as:

1. When i350 LAN chip is on, LAN1 and LAN2 can support 10Mbps~1Gbps.

2. When X540 LAN chip is on, LAN1 and LAN2 can support up to 100Mbps~10Gbps.

BIOS & Software Details

BIOS

The BIOS for this motherboard is standard for server motherboards, so we will only show a few BIOS screens.

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This is the main BIOS screen, which shows basic system information.

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The advanced tab brings you to the main advanced screen.

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The advanced CPU tab shows the CPU options for this board.

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Next, we see the Advanced CPU Power options. You can select your power options here based on performance needs.

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Moving along, we come to the advanced SATA tab.

Software

The supplied driver disk has the basic drivers that you need to get this board up and running. Again, nothing fancy here.

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Inserting the driver disk, we come to the first screen, which shows the options available for this disk. Clicking on Install Mainboard Drivers will bring you to the next screen.

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On the Chipset driver menu, select which motherboard you have to install drivers. In this case, we used the S7056 to install drivers for the TYAN S7056WGM3NR-2T.

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Now, we select which operating system that we want to use.

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Here we see the list of drivers for that operating system.

Remote Management

Basic remote management is by an IPMI 2.0 compliant baseboard management controller (BMC), which supports storage over IP and remote platform-flash through a USB 2.0 virtual hub.

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First, make sure you have IPMI enabled in the BIOS and have a wired connection to the IPMI port at the rear of the motherboard.

In order to connect to the IPMI port, first find the IP address on the machine you want to connect. Then, enter that address into your web browser on the control machine. You will see the login screen if all goes well.

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This is the main dashboard for the TYAN S7056WGM3NR-2T.

If you look down the left hand side of the screen, you will see a button to launch remote control.

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You will need Java installed for remote control to work, and you might have to reduce security controls for Java in order to be able to do this. We had to drop security controls down to medium for this to work.

From here, you can operate the server just as you would if you were sitting at the machine.

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The next tab is the Field Replaceable Unit (FRU) tab.

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The next tab is Sensor Health. You can check temperatures and voltages of different parts of the machine.

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The next tab is Configuration, and you can see on the drop-down menu what items you can adjust or monitor here.

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The Remote Control tab allows you to do resets and power on and off from here.

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The last tab is Maintenance. From here, you can update the BIOS and Firmware or restore to factory defaults.

Test System Setup

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We would like to thank TYAN, NZXT, SanDisk, Noctua, and Kingston for their support in providing parts for our test system.

The test setup is typical for a server setup. The CPUs used in these tests are two Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2 CPUs.

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This is the CPUz screen showing the various stats of the Xeon E5-2697 V2 CPUs. As you can see, this CPU has a max TDP of 130 watts. We will be using two CPUs, so that means a total of 24 cores and 48 threads.

The memory installed is 64GB of Kingston KVR16R11S4/8HA, CL11 1600MHz ValueRAM Server Premier Line. The memory modules are manufactured using a locked bill of materials (BOM), which is important to customers who use or build white box systems and require the brand and revision of the DRAM to always be the same.

Kingston can fully control the BOM (down to the chip die revision), and this is critical in server systems requiring maximum stability and uptime

For all tests that we ran, we used optimized BIOS settings for performance.

Benchmarks - System and CPU Tests

Cinebench 11.5

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. The test scenario uses all of your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene. This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. You can also run this test with a single core mode to give a single core rating.

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Again, we find the lower stock speed of the E5-2697 V2s holds this board back in these benches, but it really takes off in the multi-threaded scores. Having 48 threads is a real advantage here.

Cinebench R15

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Just like in the Cinebench 11.5 results, we see a lower single-threaded score and a much higher multi-threaded score.

wPrime

wPrime is a leading multi-threaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance. This is a great test to use to rate the system speed; it also works as a stress test to see how well the systems cooling is performing.

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As you can see, these motherboards running Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2s can really push memory bandwidth, and the S7056WGM3NR-2T keeps right up there with the rest of the lineup.

POV-Ray

POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer) creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray tracing. Ray tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective, and other effects.

This is a very good test to stress CPU threads, check memory stability, and stress overclocks to see if the system is stable. The latest version (3.6) is a free download and has a benchmark utility that we have run for these tests. The results displayed show the average PPS (pixels per second) that the render took.

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Single-threaded higher clock speeds will generally score higher with this benchmark, so a dual-CPU system does not help this benchmark much. Again, we are seeing that there is not a lot of difference in performance between the three boards tested here.

x264 HD

x264 HD Benchmark measures how fast your computer can encode a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 video file. This benchmark uses multi-core/threaded systems very efficiently and is a good memory stability test.

Results in this test are the average of each pass performed four times.

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Just like in the other tests we used with the three boards, there is very little difference in performance in this line up.

Benchmarks - Memory & UnixBench

AIDA64

AIDA64 memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, and Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth.

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AIDA64 memory tests show the Kingston CL11 1600MHz RAM kits perform very well and get a nice boost with the socket 2011 quad-channel memory setup. Regarding performance, we are still neck and neck in our tests.

LinX

LinX 0.6.4 is a CPU benchmark that measures floating-point operations per second and is used to compare CPU performance; it is also a very good stress test to run.

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Just like in the AIDA64 memory tests, we see a nice improvement with quad-channel memory on this test. Just like in the other tests, performance is still equal between these boards.

UnixBench 5.1.3

UnixBench has been around for a long time now and is a good general-purpose benchmark to test on Linux-based systems.

This is a system benchmark and shows the performance of single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks.

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This shows the system indexes after a complete UnixBench run. Here, we get an idea of how much performance gain we get using multi-threaded applications. However, many applications are single threaded, so this number is really the base, and a higher clock speed will increase both indexes.

Benchmarks - SPEC CPU2006

SPEC CPU2006 v1.2

SPEC CPU2006v1.2 measures compute intensive performance across the system using realistic benchmarks to rate real performance.

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This benchmark has many different commands to use depending on what the user is looking for. For our tests, we used basic commands that run a full test with a base tune.

You can see here the SPEC scores after full runs for Integer (int) and Floating Point (fp) tests.

Single-core runs show how fast a CPU can perform a given task. In the multi-core runs, we set SPEC CPU2006v1.2 to use all thread to measure the throughput of the system.

The additional cores/threads of this system have a huge impact on performance in these tests and really show the amount of horsepower that a dual-socket system has over a single-socket board

Single-threaded results are still very important, but when you need many single-threaded apps to run, moving to a dual-socket setup is the way to go.

In this test, we see a slight separation of multi-threaded results with a difference of about 30 to 40 points. This is not a huge difference but something to keep an eye on depending on what your application is.

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Looking at the results of single-threaded integer runs, we can get an idea of speed at which the Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2s can crunch through the different integer tests. Not all CPUs are equal here, and ones that have a higher speed will generally perform these tests faster. Naturally, using an overclocked system or CPUs with a higher stock speed will generate higher results.

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Now we run the test using all 48 threads of the dual Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2s to measure the throughput of the system. In this test, more cores/threads will have a greater effect on the outcome.

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Just like the integer tests, we now run the floating-point tests in single-core mode. The lower clock speed of the Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2s holds this benchmark back.

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Here we see the results of the multi-threaded floating-point run that uses all 48 threads of the dual Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2s. Like the multi-threaded integer test, more cores/threads will have a greater impact on the test.

Power Consumption & Final Thoughts

Power Consumption

We used the WattsUp? Pro meter in these tests. This allowed us to measure power use directly from the wall. This meter also uses a USB cable to connect to a computer and Logger Pro software to graph the readings while we run our tests.

To test total system power use, we used AIDA64 Stability test to load the CPU, and then we recorded the results.

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In the power test, we ran the GIGABYTE motherboard with an NVIDIA K5000 installed, so its power use was higher than the other two motherboards, which both had onboard graphics.

Final Thoughts

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After running the S7056WGM3NR-2T through our tests, we find it to be right in line with the other motherboards using this same CPU; performance is right up there with the rest.

The quality of this motherboard is also very high and has a very good load out of features. It is clear to us that TYAN has upped its game with these motherboards, and the BIOS comes tuned very well for Ivy Bridge Xeons.

The storage options for this board are also equal to other boards in this class, and it should make for a fine storage server. The S7056WGM3NR-2T also has a capacity of 512GB RAM. This board would also work well with VM applications.

The warranty for this motherboard is three years (36 months) for workmanship and materials. Please see the TYAN website for more details.

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William Harmon started working with computers back in 2005 and began overclocking all kinds of different setups. My focus back then and even now is extreme cooling using Single Stage Phase units, Cascades and Liquid Nitrogen. During this time I was also in several competitions that GIGABYTE had sponsored, GOOC 2009 and 2010. Using technics in overclocking and cooling that I have learned over the years I started building high speed workstations and servers for clients who needed higher performing systems. Many of these systems are used in high frequency trader companies and work stations used in all kinds of professions. At TweakTown, I provide and develop accurate test and benchmark methods for servers and other equipment to help make purchasing decisions easier.

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