TYAN B2865G20S4H Industry 19" rack-mountable 1U chassis Barebone Server 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra DDR333/400

Pros: This system will work right off the box if you know how to shop for processor, memory and HDD.

Easy to setup

Cons: The noise level is unbearable, especially if you are buying it for your home. However, with a little research you might be able to purchase some quiet fans (~40mm) to replace the loud fans inside.

Other Thoughts: However, with a little research you might be able to purchase some quiet fans (~40mm) to replace the loud fans inside. You can also disconnect a couple of the fans if your area is not very hot.

Despite this item is a non-refundable, New Egg will do everything they can to help you get help to solve your issue. I was very impressed with their response to me.

Pros: This most recent purchase will be our fifth and sixth 1U Tyan barebones kit, and so far we are completely satisfied with them. They are well laid out, put together well, and made from quality components. There are a lot of nice touches in a Tyan barebones kit: PCI and PCI-E riser cards, full documentation including an engineering manual, and a *very* high quality all copper CPU heatsink. There is even a mainboard layout decal on the inside of the top cover. Can handle ECC or non-ECC RAM. Dual core capable.

Cons: Having the rails included with the kit is extremely convenient, but they are a bit on the flimsy side. Be careful when installing the screws-they are very soft and the heads will shear easily. Also, the 2865 mainboard lacks a PCI-X slot, which eliminates a lot of popular add-on RAID cards. Lots of PCI-E slots though.

Other Thoughts: Don't forget to check your BIOS version. At the time of this review, the newest BIOS for the 2865 mainboard is v3.04. You will need a Win98 (or equivalent) boot disk. Rather than go through the aggravation of installing a slimline floppy drive for a one-time BIOS flash, I simply boot to a USB floppy drive. It's quick, painless, and straightforward.

Pros: Solid construction
Well-integrated system
Good performance
Quality components

Cons: Individual activity LEDs do not work for the SATA drives. No big deal... only negative thing I can think of.

Other Thoughts: These systems are great. I have had two running for over a year with Athlon X2 CPUs. While the 939 platform and DDR I RAM are outdated I would not hesitate to run a newer, AM2-based, Tyan system. I have not had a single stability problem and have run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Solaris & RedHat Enterprise with absolutely no problems. I use one as an Asterisk server with a T1 card and the quality is flawless. Infact, SUN uses (used?) the same board in this system on their entry level servers.

Pros: AMD Desktop proc, low cost, 4 SATA hot-swap HDDs, cheap nas/linux/windows server

Cons: LOUD, software raid

Other Thoughts: Yes, it might upset some of you, I said loud, and I have a 1U supermicro P4 4-SATA hotswap server I was upgrading from (as this was inexpensive) but even in my basement, in a server cabinet, you can hear this box screaming upstairs to the point it isn't useful as the media center server as I had planned. The old SupoerMicro stays on and the new box only boots to rsync backup files and then i shut it down.

Runs CentOS 4.5 & 5 just fine, I don't use raid anymore (software or hardware), just 4 seperate hot-swap drives you can umount and swap other drives in.

Pros: Mostly all inclusive barebones system (needs CPU, memory, HD's). Has 4 SATA hot swap drive sleds. SATA cables included and already attached to backplane. Even comes with rails! Bios, manufacturing, even packaging, etc seem very solid.

Cons: Some might consider the fans "noisy" but I don't care because I'm placing it in a server room... I feel it's supposed to be noisy!

Other Thoughts: I bought this for a Windows Home Server installation and everything seems to be working great!

Pros: Price
desktop mboard with easy drivers
very well put together, not cheap
good cooling

Cons: none that i can think of

Pros: Excellent Product, I currently have 3, 1 Gateway- 1 Opteron DC 170, 2gigs ECC DDR400, 1 500gig Sata 300, 1 Gateway- 1 Opteron DC 165 2gigs ECC DDR400, 1 500gig Sata 300, 1 Media/Storage Server- 1 Opteron 165 DC 3gigs ECC DDR400, 5 500Gig Sata 300, 1 250gig Sata 300

Cons: None, people need to stop saying the "FANS ARE LOUD" obviously you have never owned High end equipment let alot server equipment the Noise Level is very Normal. Most Servers are Loud, Server rooms are insanely loud.

Other Thoughts: And to the Person who says ECC doesn't work, you are very Wrong ECC works completly fine.

All of my servers are using ECC memory modules, and just because "you" think it's a "desktop" board doens't mean they cannot handle ecc learn more about the board before making claims. things to pay attention for ECC/Non-ECC Buffered/Non-Buffered
Read up on the Nforce4 Ultra Chipset
I'm using this RAM if anyone else wants the reliability of ECC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820144162
Tyan
http://www.tyan.com/product_barebones_detail.aspx?pid=37

Pros: Excellent air flow (a big problem with most 1U chassis); inexpensive; supported hardware is easy to find and inexpensive; 4 Drive bays; rails included (and they work well); CPU heatsink included (and it works well, too); a cabinet full of Tyan 1Us looks real sharp, even without "pretty faceplates".

Cons: Noise (which doesn't matter in a data center anyway), and we could not get lm_sensors to work with this board. Also, as with all of Tyan's RAID support (including their "glorious" TARO chip) is still software RAID, so you're better off using easily-portable Linux RAID or finding a real RAID card (most applications requiring 4 drives or less are well-suited for Linux software RAID anyway).

Other Thoughts: We typically like to get more current hardware (1207 CPUs, for example), but when we've got a weak budget on a build, this 939 workhorse gives us the 1U density we love with the no-nonsense inexpensiveness we need.

Pros: Very well laid out. Easy to put together.

Cons: VERY noisy!
No way to lock in any of the hard drives.
COM2 on the motherboard very difficult to bring out.

Other Thoughts: Tyan, get different fans, this server sounds like a Jet about to take off.

Pros: Extremely nice layout.
Nice looks
Excellent driver and BIOS support

Rock stable (so far)

Cons: Noisy, but that is to be expected with a 1U server.

PCI retention clip is flimsy/cheap. This is a very minor issue.

Other Thoughts: My Specs:
AMD Dual Core Opteron 175
2GB PC of RAM (See Tyan.com for recommended memory)
4x500GB in RAID-5.

The system is running Windows 2003 R2 x64
Virtual Server x64
SQL Server 2005 x64
Hosting 2 virtual machines (2003 Standard)

Up to 25 users hitting SQL at any given time with no slowdowns at all.

Not bad for a machine that cost less than $600.