Although Tyan's graphics division walks on the wild side with radical heat sink designs and bright blue color schemes, the company's motherboards are decidedly more reserved. When it comes to workstation motherboards, reserved isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that the Tiger K8W comes on a plain green board without any visual flair or excess. Since workstations rarely have case windows, it's not like anyone's going to see the board. However, I have to admit that the board's muted aesthetic doesn't exude the same sports-car feel as the Ferrari-red K8T Master2.

What the Tiger K8W lacks in visual appeal it makes up with a near-perfect layout. Like the K8T Master2, the board conforms to standard ATX dimensions and will fit inside most mid-tower cases. However, Tyan has done a better job organizing the board's various sockets, components, and expansion slots to maximize the limited ATX real estate.

One of the Tiger's biggest layout coups is its smart power connector layout. All the board's power connectors are located at or near the top edge of the board, which essentially eliminates power cable clutter around not only the CPU sockets, but also a typical system's exhaust fans.

The Tiger's excellent layout is especially impressive considering that the board has an extra power connector. This auxiliary four-pin MOLEX connector must be used when running the board off a standard ATX power supply, which is fully supported. The Tiger K8W also supports EPS 12V SSI power supplies, and the manual clearly explains the plug patterns for each PSU configuration.

Rather than stacking the Tiger's CPU sockets along the length of the board, Tyan spreads them across the board's width. This layout leaves enough room for standard AMD coolers and heat sink retention brackets, and Tyan includes a couple of brackets with the board. The layout still puts the system's CPU heat sinks close to the AGP slot, but the Tiger has more clearance than the K8T Master2.

Because heat dissipation isn't just for processors, Tyan uses a low-profile heat sink to cool the Tiger's MOSFETs. The heat sink is fairly small and far from typical in-case air flow patterns, but seems to be effective.

A low-profile heat sink also makes an appearance on the board's AGP tunnel chip. This squat heat sink leaves plenty of clearance around the AGP slot for longer graphics cards. Curiously, the Tiger K8W doesn't feature an AGP Pro slot, which limits the board's compatibility with workstation-class graphics cards. There is a silver lining to the Tiger's more mainstream AGP port, though. While AGP Pro slots lack graphics card retention tabs, the Tiger's classic AGP slot snugly holds graphics cards in place.

Because its DIMM slots are located all the way at the top edge of the board, the Tiger K8W has no problem with DIMM tab clearance. Like the K8T Master2, the board has four DIMM slots and supports up to 8GB of registered DDR memory. Registered DIMMs are required, and the Tiger also supports ECC memory.

To make memory installation as easy as possible, the Tiger's DIMM slots are color-coded in two-slot pairs. Since Opterons have dual-channel memory controllers, DIMMs should be added two at a time for optimal performance.

The Tiger's only layout faux pas is the placement of its IDE ports, which are all the way at the bottom of the board with the rest of the storage ports. As with the K8T Master2, users with full tower cases may have problems reaching optical drives mounted in higher 5.25" drive bays.

Limited board real estate may create problems for the Tiger's IDE ports, but Tyan manages to squeeze five PCI slots onto the board anyway. These are plain old 32-bit/33MHz PCI slots, just like on the K8T Master2.

The Tiger K8W doesn't need to split its port array between a rear cluster and PCI back plate. The board's port cluster includes PS/2, serial, and parallel ports in addition to three analog audio jacks and an Ethernet port. The port cluster also offers four USB ports: two USB 2.0 and two USB 1.1. Headers for two Firewire ports and additional two USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 ports are available on the board, but Tyan doesn't ship the Tiger with any expansion hardware for those ports.

Update 04/19/2004 - Tyan has informed me that the latest Tiger K8W retail packages are shipping with a Firewire PCI back plate header.