SUPERMICRO MBD-X9DRL-3F-O ATX Server Motherboard Dual LGA 2011 DDR3 1600

Pros: Lots of drive ports. IPMI with decicated NIC. Responsive customer service.

Cons: May not be ready for W2K8_R2_64. No drivers included in box.

Other Thoughts: Running well with Xeon E5-2609 and Dynatron R8 CPU cooler. Had to upgrade BIOS from 1.0b to 1.0c before I could use the SAS RAID function on 64-bit Windows 2008 R2, plus request drivers from manufacturer. It was mandatory to register on their web site to get support, but once I did, reply was quick and helpful, with links to download site. The IPMI is a great improvement over the proprietary solution on the server it is replacing.

Pros: Stable, inexpensive and lots of features.

Cons: The VGA port is not well supported

Other Thoughts: KVR16R11D4/16 16GB Kingson modules work great on this board.
Running Proxmox 2.X on this, works great.

Pros: Lots of good specs on paper; price is right. Getting a dual LGA-2011 board onto an ATX form factor is the main reason I bought this board.

Cons: There are two reasons I gave it 3-eggs instead of 5.

(1) Of the 8 mounting holes, 3 are located where you (including Antec, Corsair, and Cooler Master) don't expect them. To mount this in typical enthusiast ATX cases, you'll have to use nylon stand-off's which gives the middle of the board more ability to flex than I'd like.

(2) The two CPU sockets are placed so closely together that there is no room for the fan on the stock SuperMicro heatsink / fan (SNK-P0050AP4). This means you'll have to run one CPU with a fan and one without.

Other Thoughts: If you're putting this in a 2U rack-mount case using a low-profile (fanless) heatsink, this is a top-notch board. If you're putting this in a pedestal ATX case to run a meaty Hyper-V server next to your desk, you may want to consider something else. As an alternative, the ASUS Z9PA-D8 looks like it has more-standard mounting holes, but still suffers from sockets being too close together.

Pros: dual lga 2011
intel chipset
6 SATA ports (2 of which are 6Gbps)
8 SAS'/SATA ports
ipmi makes dvd un-needed

Cons: prior to flashing bios and loading drivers, system would blue screen on me and act very quirky - erratic keyboard and mouse response

WARNING, installing windows server 2008 R2 utilizes UEFI, will automagically add windows boot manager as the first startup device in bios. when I flashed from bios ver 1.1 to 1.2, the new bios lost the Windows Boot Manager option. I called support and they suggested repairing the OS installation which didn't work. I had to reload windows from scratch!

cannot get turbo mode to run cpu at 2.5Ghz. CPU is Intel Xeon 2620 -- CPU only runs 2Ghz. already asked support whats up with this and they initially told me to enable turbo in the bios, there is no such option. waiting for updated support response.

Onboard sata / sas intel x600 controllers are gimped to only raid 0, 1 or 1+0 --
even though the motherboard is based on intel x600 chipset, you cannot unlock RAID-5. On intel branded mobos with x600 controller, you can purchase upgrade to RAID-5, 6, 50 or 60. i would have liked to seen this mobo supporting raid-5 unlock. i ended up having to buy a dedicated raid controller so no use for 14 sata ports on the motherboard. what a waste. next time i'll have to buy intel.

ipmi virtual media/remote access can be flakey, its java based and kinda slow

Pros: It was cheap.

Cons: Problems from day one with this board. It would only post half the time, OS would constantly freeze up. Memtest failed like crazy and Kingston replaced my 8x KVR1333D3D4R9S/8G (listed as compatible) with 8x KVR13LR9D4/8HC which they say is "more compatible." This fixed my memtest failures. Computer still fails to boot up the majority of the time. Sent in for RMA and all they said was "it works." It was a super drawn out process to deal with Supermicro support so there's no way to just return this and try a different motherboard. I give them the codes where the motherboard hangs up and they don't say what those signify or even if they won't help. It's just the usual "can you test your memory in another computer" routine. I basically have a $2k brick sitting on my desk due to supermicro.

Other Thoughts: I will never look at supermicro when buying any motherboards again. You might win the lottery and have a working one and never have to deal with them but I lost and their support was awful and slow.

Pros: ....

Cons: WARNING CPU's are too close together, I have two factory Intel fans and they do not both fit on this board

Pros: Simple, solid, no-frills board.

Standard ATX size.

Reasonably priced for a 2x LGA2011 board.

Cons: Can't check temperatures and fan speeds from the BIOS. (BIOS is pretty weak overall.)

CPU temperature is reported as "low / med / high" rather than actual numbers. Other sensors on the board report standard values.

CPU sockets are really close together and also close to the RAM, so finding coolers that fit was challenging.

Once had the IPMI interface hang while unmounting a remote ISO. System was very slow to POST after that, but eventually booted and has been fine since. Board shipped with an older revision of the IPMI firmware, so maybe this is fixed.

IPMI web interface is pretty slow, and doesn't auto-refresh the system health info.

Personally would have preferred 2x SFF-8087 connectors instead of 8x SATA for the SAS ports just to reduce the amount of wiring jammed into the chassis.

Other Thoughts: I installed this in a Supermicro CSE-833T-653B 3U chassis, along with 2x Xeon E5-2620 CPUs, 2x Dynatron R8 coolers, and 8x 4GB Kingston ECC DDR3-1600 modules. Works wonderfully as a KVM virtualization host running Proxmox.

Pros: Great price point for dual LGA 2011. Rock solid so far.

Cons: none so far

Other Thoughts: I've had this board now for around 3 weeks running with a single E5-2620, 32gb (4x8), on XenServer 6.0 running Win7, 2008R2, and a couple of FreeBSD machines. It is running very smooth with zero problems. My board came with 1.0a BIOS.

Installed XenServer via IPMI with no problems. As with my other Supermicro mobo, manual is excellent. Board looks to be well thought out. I debated for a while on which dual LGA 2011 board, but I certainly don't regret the choice I made. The board mounts didn't match my case's declared ATX mounting positions exactly, but I only needed to reposition one mount and omit one more another. I certainly look forward to another E5-2620 and another 32gb of RAM for an even sweeter setup than I have today.

Pros: My board shipped with the current 1.0 BIOS so I had none of the headaches of the previous reviewer. I was able to mount an ISO of Win2k8 R2 remotely and install off of that in record time and minimal effort using the built in IPMI. iKVM works great, though still nowhere near as fast as RDP for working in Windows itself. The built in Matrox Graphics are pretty snappy if you like to be at the machine. It runs with 8x 4GB UDIMMs without a problem.

Cons: I can't think of one yet.

Other Thoughts: The board I really wanted was the X9DRL-If-O (same board but without SAS ports which I won't ever miss) but these Romley boards are rarer than rocking horse poop so I had to take what I could get. I paired it with Dyanatron R15 coolers sitting on dual E5-2620 cpus.

Pros: Rock solid performance so far with a single E5-2640 CPU and 4 low-voltage RDIMMs and an add-on LSI2008 controller (I hope the X9-boards with built-in LSI 6G SAS do arrive soon).

Cons: The BIOS shipped was pre-1.0, and earlier this week the 1.0 code was released. DO NOT attempt to upgrade using the built-in CTRL-HOME recovery code in the AMI BIOS! If you attempt that you will have no working USB/SATA/SAS ports (which means that built-in iKVM is useless). Only way to communicate with the BIOS is through the serial port, and the only way to reflash the BIOS (again) is to use an add-on card and hook a bootable harddrive up to that.

The reason for my upgrade was to try to fix the annoying BMC fan control restart issue when booting ESXi (fans increased to very high RPMs, then slowed down, rinse and repeat). This also meant upgrading the BMC/iKVM firmware, which can easily be done from the web UI (following the requirements that all config needs to be erased. Beware though that ALL data also means the default ADMIN user will be gone, so you'll have no way to access the BMC until you get physical access to the box and run IPMICFG locally.