Review of the Tyan S3115 board (S3115GM2N)
The Tyan S3115 is an Atom board made by Tyan for small servers. I bought one for just that and thought I'd share since I couldn't find much information on it. There are many cheap Atom boards out there in the mini-itx form factor. Most are between £60-£110, maybe a little more for the Nvidia ION boards with Wifi. So why the hell would you want to pay £150 for one? The S3115 board comes in 4 versions. The S3115GN is useless, buy a cheap Intel D510 board - it only has 2 sata, the 945 graphics and no iKVM. The S3115GMN doesn't have a entry on the tyan site, but from the product number it should the same but with one network card missing. The last version is the S3115GM2N-B which just seems to lack the PCI/PCI-E x1 combo favoring a PCI only approach. However a cookie for the first person to find anything but the S3115GM2N on sale in the UK... I bought mine from Ballicom, who I'd never used before but where very good.
The S3115GM2N has a measly 8MB for the tiny Aspeed AST2050 graphics card, 4 usb ports (two at the back, two on the board), 4 sata ports (although one is so stupidly placed I don't know how you would use it...). The only downside of the board seems to be the maximum of 2GB of RAM, using SODIMM sticks, unlike the D510 board from intel which takes one stick of up to 4GB of normal DDR2. The board is cerified to work on RHEL5.2 and RHEL5.4 in both 64bit and 32bit.
The board comes in the typical tyan box, along with a driver CD, 2 sata cables, a backpanel and a manual with a page saying 'china only'. Great! Also they forget to tell you that the 'iKVM' password for root is 'superuser'.
So far all seems pretty good, be carefull the board turns num lock on at boot, so on laptop keyboards watch out!
