Fail: Four out of five Tyan motherboards

Don wrote the Gripe Line recently about a frustrating — and time-consuming — experience with Tyan motherboards. “I had heard only good things about Tyan,” he says. So he and his colleagues enthusiastically set about building some servers using these motherboards.

Everything started out well. “We built three servers using the Tyan S4980 motherboard,” says Don. “Two of those have 4x AMD Opteron 8354 quad-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM. One has a 2x AMD Opteron 8346 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. All of the RAM we used was Kingston KVR667D2D4P5 in 4GB sticks. And these servers have 6x WD ‘green’ 1 TB hard drives.” These three servers turned out great.

[ Frustrated by your tech support? You’re not alone. Get answers from Christina Tynan-Wood in InfoWorld’s Gripe Line newsletter. ]

For the next batch of server, though, Don and his collegues were more ambitious. “We wanted to build five servers with 4x AMD Opteron AMD 8380 CPUs with 64GB of RAM each.” The S4980 motherboard they used the first time — in the servers that turned out so well — didn’t support this CPU. “So we went a bit bigger: The Tyan S4985. And here is where our problems started.”

The first problem was locating a seller who had this motherboard in stock. That turned out to be quite difficult. “Perhaps that was a sign of things to come,” says Don, “but we didn’t see it that way.” They bought out the inventory of one online store and had Tyan drop-ship two more from another reseller. Then they got busy building servers. “But we couldn’t get any of these motherboards to boot the first time,” he says. “After several hours just wasting time, we discovered that installing a retail 8380 in sockets one and two, and an OEM 8380 in sockets three and four worked.”

It seemed like these servers would be fine — for a while. “Within a few weeks, though, the motherboards started failing,” says Don. “The first one failed while it was still in the VAR’s return period, so we easily returned it. The next one failed soon after. We had to return that one to Tyan.”

Tyan confirmed the motherboard was dead and shipped a replacement. This was all very aggravating, says Don. “But what they shipped us as a replacement was downright disturbing.”

“It was packed in the exact same carton we shipped the dead motherboard in, which is no big deal. But no one sealed the carton. So the board wasn’t secured.” Don warily opened the carton and found things were even worse inside.

“The motherboard was packed in a static bag that had many tears and holes. We pulled the board out of that and discovered most of the labels were peeled off and all the connectors were yellowed. There also appeared to be water damage on the bottom, residue near the sockets, a blob of solder on one of the CPU brackets, and thermal compound on the CPU retainer,” he says.

Don contacted Tyan immediately and asked if this motherboard had been tested before leaving Tyan. He was assured that it had. “I was told it had passed the ‘Linux test.'”

Not reassured but with not much choice, Don spent an hour prepping and installing the board. “I wasn’t surprised to find that it was DOA,” he says. Shortly after he returned that motherboard, two more of those five ambitious servers with this motherboard failed as well.

There is nothing like having to take the finished result apart and return the parts — repeatedly — to rob a team of its enthusiasm for a project. “So thanks for letting me vent,” says Don.

Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.