Tyan Thunder CX GC68A-B7126 Block Diagram
We could not find the block diagram for the server, but we found one for the Tyan S7126 motherboard that is at the base of this system.
Here we can see that we have the two CPUs with 1DPC memory configurations. Each CPU has 48x PCIe Gen4 lanes exposed of a total of 64 possible. With the smaller EATX motherboard, this helps to optimize cost since the form factor and customer requirements often mean that extra PCIe connectivity cannot be used. Where it could have been used, however, is to make a 12x NVMe version of this system, but that would also add costs for cables and would require more cooling.
All of these features are interrelated, so we just wanted to give a quick view regarding why that is the case here. The overall layout Tyan has a number of options for including options as we saw in our Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE Review.
Tyan Thunder CX GC68A-B7126 Management
The Tyan web management interface uses the newer MegaRAC SP-X solution as a base. This is becoming the industry standard management solution that many vendors are adopting and adapting for their platforms.
Tyan’s version has a number of customizations. One item that we surprisingly liked was the simple dashboard. Many vendors use overly complex dashboards with many status indicators but the performance of the dashboard is much worse in those implementations. Tyan’s implementation is relatively fast among SP-X implementations we have used.
One can see features such as sensor readings with temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, power consumption, and other metrics. These sensor readings are displayed on the web interface but are really designed to be consumed by data center monitoring and management packages.
Changing various settings is relatively straightforward. The new HTML5 interface is even easy to navigate on phones and tablets. This is an enormous ease-of-use upgrade versus the last time we looked at the interface in our 2011-era Tyan IPMI 2.0 Remote Management WebGUI Tour.
Remote iKVM features are included with this solution. That is something that vendors such as Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo offer at an additional cost on their servers. Tyan still offers the Java iKVM but now has a HTML5 version in their solution. The HTML5 version we tested does not have remote image mounting enabled, but not all vendors (e.g. Supermicro) have that feature parity on their new HTML5 iKVM suites.
Based on comments in our previous articles, many of our readers have not used a Tyan server and therefore have not seen the management interface. We have a 7-minute video clicking through the interface and doing a quick tour of the Tyan management interface:
It is certainly not the most entertaining subject, however, if you are considering these systems, you may want to know what the web management interface is on each machine and that tour can be helpful.
Tyan Thunder CX GC68A-B7126 Performance
We wanted to see the impact of the cooling on a higher-end part one might put into this system. Limited to 205W TDP, we used Intel Xeon Gold 6338’s here to see the impact.
Overall performance was within the margin of our baseline results using a higher-end 2U platform designed to cool 270W TDP CPUs. Still, we did notice a slight drift downward compared in results even if <1.5%. Given that we are testing what is basically a maximum configuration for this platform and it was within our testing margin of error, it seems like Tyan’s cooling solution is working.
Next, let us get to the power consumption, STH Server Spider, along with our final words.
