TYAN announced its new Thunder K8W (S2885) mainboard for 2-way Opteron processors designed for workstation applications. Supporting practically all popular technologies and capabilities, the new Thunder K8W is definitely one of the best workstation mainboards for 2P Opteron CPUs around.

The new platform from TYAN is based on AMD 8000-sreies core-logic and provides terrific set of features, including AGP Pro 8x, PCI-X, 8 DIMM slots for 16GB of PC2700 DDR memory with ECC, Gigabit Ethernet, integrated Serial ATA-150, FireWire, and 6-channel audio with SPDIF support.

The full specs of the newcomer look as follows:

• Supports two Socket 940 AMD Opteron processors with dual-channel memory support;
• AMD 8151, 8131 and 8111 I/O tunnels;
• 8 DIMM slots for up to 16GB of registered PC1600, PC2100 or PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory;
• 1 AGP Pro 8x (110W) slot;
• 1 PCI (32-bit/33MHz) slot, 2 PCI-X (64-bit/100MHz) slots, 2 PCI-X (64-bit/133MHz) slots;
• 2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 4 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 (from Silicon Image);
• 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet from Broadcom;
• 5 USB 1.1 ports;
• 2 FireWire ports;
• 2 PS/2 ports, 1 Parallel and 1 Serial ports;
• Server Management: total of six 3-pin fan headers with tachometer monitoring, four fan headers with (PWM) speed control, one 2-pin Chassis Intrusion header, temperature, voltage and fan monitoring;
• SSI EEB v3.0 footprint (12”x13”; 304.8x330.2mm).

We mentioned earlier this year that there are very few 2P Opteron mainboards with AGP support, a dramatically critical aspect for workstation products. Obviously, with the launch of TYAN Thunder K8W (S2885) and other similar feature-rich mainboards the situation with the availability of powerful workstation platforms for AMD Opteron CPUs should start improving.

The Thunder K8W (S2885) is currently sampling, and will start shipping later this month. Pricing may vary depending on configuration and region.