SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DAL-i-O Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5500 ATX Dual Intel Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series Server Motherboard

Pros: Worked out of the box with two Xeon X5650's, 12Gb of Gskill non-ecc DDR3 1600 (running at 1333) and a GTX 480.

The layout works well to make the most out of the small ATX size.

The board has an excellent high quality feel to it. Comes with a thorough manual written in real English.

Cons: No cooling for the VRMs.

Heatsink on the chipset becomes half covered by a decent sized video card and so far it's gotten up to 80c. I'm sure it's okay since it was designed that way, but a larger heatsink or a fan would have been nice as some of the other Supermicro boards have a small heatsink/fan combo on the chipset.

No heatsink on the ICH10R, probably doesn't matter though but most other boards seem to have one.

5500 instead of 5520, lack of PCI-E lanes.

Other Thoughts: Noctua NH-U9DX's fit fairly well.

It's amazing that so much can fit into the ATX form factor.

Pros: I got this mobo with BIOS 1.0c so it was compatible with 2 x E5620 I've installed. Everything worked totally fine and stable (see cons below)

Cons: BUT it was slower then 2 x E5530 for massively multithreaded benchmark, slower ~20%.

Pros: Can fit in a small case. Powerful. 16 cores in system monitor looks awesome.

Cons: Egg taken away. We originally set this up as a RAID 5 PC. It had great read times, but suffered hard core at write, and random read/seek times. This did not make the business I sold it to happy. Server 2003 SE

Other Thoughts: I talked to Intel about its ICH chip set. Also talked to super micro (which was awesome customer service) about the problem. Super micro was unable to replicate the problem. We solved the problem by going to a RAID card. Still a great board I just wouldn't trust the on-board raid controller.

Pros: none.. DOA

Cons: DOA

Pros: 1. Support ECC memory for a server.
2. Relatively inexpensive.
3. It worked the first time I put everything together (power supply, memory, cd-rom, drives, video card etc.)

You need a paper clip to short cut the power pins to start the computer, since it does not come with a on/off switch cable.

Cons: The Northbridge has a design flaw of overheating. Turn on the computer and the temperature hikes above 70 degree Celsius (158 degree Fahrenheit) after 15 minutes (with CPUs idle). I did some investigation and found Supermicro put a very short heat sink without a fan on the Northbridge. Why did they put a short heat sink? Because you won't be able to put in any of your PCI or PCI e card if the Northbridge heat sink is tall. This short heat sink appears to be an afterthought of the mother board designer. I am surprised that the quality assurance team of Super Micro let it out to the market. There is even no workaround by adding my own heat sink or a fan for Northbridge since I need to put in one of the PCI e video card which this motherboard is lacking.

Please thoroughly inspect the physically design of PCI slots and the Northbridge Heatsink before you make a purchase decision (which is to avoid buying it.)

Other Thoughts: This motherboard does not have a build-in video card. You have to buy an video card separately. (Even though, it won't work since there is a conflict of space between PCI card and heat sink of the Northbridge.)

Pros: Good layout
Integrated audio
No integrated video
Nice selection of expansion slots

Cons: Limited selection of power supplies with the required two EPS12V connectors, but not really a fault of the board itself. Other than that, this is a perfect workstation board.

Other Thoughts: Using it with dual E5530s, Intel BXSTS100C heatsink/fans, 12 gigs DDR3 and a Corsair HX1000W power supply. Works perfectly.

Pros: This is my first time buying a Supermicro board and I am very impressed with everything. The packaging it came in was plain and simple. The manual was robust and the six SATA cables are 18" instead of 12" inches.

Unlike many of the i7 boards I've seen (Granted, this is E5500 and not i7), this one has its PCI-E slots spaced normally. This means that one is able to use two passive PCIe video cards without them overheating, although this is probably due to the lack of a need to support an SLI bridge (which this board does not support). Onboard audio makes it perfect for a desktop system as it eliminates the need for an addon card. It's also got two legacy PCI ports.

The manual is written very well and in proper English (and not some poor translation).

Cons: For this price it would be nice to give some more SATA ports or SAS ports via a second controller (Intel ICHR10 can *always* only give six ports). No legacy IDE (it's a good thing I just bought a SATA optical drive).

Also, this device has two sensor chips, one of which is not supported by Linux (at the time of writing) which means that hardware monitoring will be a problem (I have difficulty installing the Superdoctor software in Linux, although it is officially supported).

No overclocking, but this is expected from a server board.

Placement of the ATX and EPS power connectors are horrible for my case and have already caused one SATA power connector to crack (because one of the drive bays in my case is located about an inch from that area).

I wish the specs would state more clearly that you MUST use both processors to utilize all the RAM slots.

This uses AMI BIOS and has serial redirection as an option. However it is disabled by default, which means that on a bios reset

Other Thoughts: (cont.) you will need to attach it to a VGA display in order to manage the machine. This seems rather foolish as serial connection is usually considered a failsafe. I do hope they change this in later revisions; althout this is the second machine I am using with such a BIOS
This board will take regular *Desktop* memory (UDIMM, or unregistered memory) and you do not need to buy ECC RDIMM for this.

The heatsink mounts on this board (and apparently on all 5500 boards) are NOT compatible with i7 heatsinks (with the plastic push pins). These use *Screws* and the holes are too small for the plastic pins.

Also, you MUST have two processors installed in order to use all six memory banks. This is due to the memory controller being integrated into the processor, and the fact that the 5500s use two QPIs, one to access its own memory, and one to access the memory of the second CPU. This of course makes it faster, but it does bring about that limitation.