EVGA Classified SR-X 270-SE-W888-KR LGA 2011 Intel C606 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HPTX Intel Motherboard

Pros: After registering the product you can opt. for 10 year warranty for only 60$ extra, Very happy hasn't given me any issue or hiccups as of yet, must make sure to update every thing right away then should see no issues

Cons: Yes it is little pricey but you get what you pay for.

Most know how to mod a case if you plan to acquire one of these, not easy to find an exact match that fits all spec's of this board with out getting your hands dirty.

Other Thoughts: It be nice if they made more of these or even considered to produce a higher spec version but seams evga not interested in doing so.

Pros: Super cheap. Got it for $10 after $640 mail-in rebate. Takes two processors, so now I can cook two eggs at once on the Pentium II MMX chips I installed in it. Takes 6 RAM sticks, so now I can finally upgrade to 384MB! (6 x 64MB). Insane!

Cons: No legacy support. I would really like to be able to use my Serial port 104-key Tandy keyboard, but no luck. Also, it would be nice if it supported really futuristic processors like the AMD K6-2.

Other Thoughts: It's a decent board, considering the moderate rebate. I should be able to play Doom II for DOS on max settings and at LEAST 320x240 once it comes out!

Pros: It is a nice laid out board for the most part. It allows upto 3-way SLI/Crossfire while using 2 xeon processors. It comes with enough onboard usb headers to connect the ones from the chassis and anywhere else you have them. The power, reset and cmos button on the motherboard, come in quite handy. You can even clear the cmos, without opening the chassis, with the button, next to the i/o ports. You can even trouble shoot, pci-e slots, ram slots and cpu's by turning them on/off.

Cons: The only real main con I have found with this board, is that the front panel audio header is between the edge of the board and one of the PCI-e x16 slots. If you plan to use this PCI-e slot, you cannot use the audio header.

The only other problem I encountered was that I had to bend the bottom of the I/O shield off to allow it to fit on the Blackthorn Ultra case.

Other Thoughts: Blackthorn Ultra case, 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620 Sandy Bridge-EP 2.0GHz (2.5GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 2011 95W Six-Core, 2 x EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P3-1469-RX GeForce GTX 560, HT Omega E-Claro sound card

Pros: To make a comparison with this and the SR2, which
was the 1st of the 2 EVGA dual processor boards..

Cons: My question is why does this board have only a 3 yr.
warranty when the SR2 EVGA Mobo has a lifetime for both
parts and labor? This board does cost enough in the 1st
place and should have the same warranty. Do you agree?

Manufacturer Response:

Hello,

We had a warranty change on 7/01/2011 that moved us away from lifetime warranty products in exchange for warrantys that would be transferable in order to better support more customers. (http://www.evga.com/support/warranty/Default.asp) Additionally with a lifetime warranty comes a higher premium on the products, instead of that we offer the ability to purchase an extended warranty on a product up to a 10 year warranty. If you have any further questions regarding warranty please contact me directly at bbrunson@evga.com

Thank you,
Brandon B

Pros: Nice looking board

Cons: I have had 2 in the last 30 days both with bad BIOS. Many internittent and casding problems. Ran out of memory space running two ATI 7970 Video Cards and an Areca Raid Card so I had to disable the eSATA and the Intel Raid in the BIOS

Other Thoughts: Excellent Customre Support however most of the techs are not familiar with the board. I am going to try one more and try an asus.

Manufacturer Response:

Hello,

Can you please email me any issues you had with a corrupt BIOS as we have redundant chips on the board that you should be able to switch to and reflash the original BIOS, Matth@evga.com

Regards,
Matthew Hurwitz
Assistant Product Manager

Pros: I own a small Visual Effects company specializing in 3D productions. Having the absolute fastest workstation(s) for this kind of work is something we have spent a lot of money on testing. We have tested the SR-X, the Asus Z9PE-D8 (another dual socket 2011), the SR-2 of course, and even the AMD 4 Socket boards (16 cores per CPU, 64 cores total). I can officially say that the SR-X is the best, BUT, that comes with a disclaimer! Be sure to read "Cons" and "Other thoughts" for everything you probably want to know before buying.

Big Q: Is it worth spending twice the budget to buy an SR-X with dual E5 CPU's? Or is it better to spend half the budget for an overclocked/watercooled SR-2? Well... Don't rule out the SR-2 just yet! If you read my other comments you'll see why you still might want to go the SR-2 route, depending on your specific needs.

Best things to say about the SR-X:
Great Windows 7 Performance
Higher RAM capacity
Noticeable GPU performance increase (Quadro's)
Other st

Cons: Read Other Thoughts for more details:

Cons: Not a dramatic difference in CPU/GPU performance for 3D workstation use. An overclocked and watercooled SR-2 will cost you half the price and operate at nearly the same speed as the SR-X when rendering 3D. You'll see a bigger margin of performance in other CPU computing areas, but not really where you need it the most.

Passmark and other benchmark websites will show a 30-40% performance improvements, but again, pay close attention to WHERE those calculation improvments are. They're not everywhere.

Why 4 stars and not 5? Because the SR-X we got direct from EVGA seems to not have all of it quirks worked out yet. It works well, but only for about 3 to 4 days straight before we starting getting errors that eventually lead to crashing - HDD/SDD related. Could be unrelated to the Mobo, but doubtful.

Worst things about SR-X:
No overclocking, but that's Intel's fault for locking CPU's.
Still only 2 SATA3 RAID Ports, seriously EVGA?

Other Thoughts: We tested both the E5-2690 cpus and the E5-2687w cpus, the 2687w's are faster, but only by a 2% margin. We first tested the Asus Z9PE-D8 and were very impressed with overall performance, especially in Windows 7, but 2 things were lacking... (1) even with PCI-E gen3 the graphics cards seemed to run slower than on the SR-2. (2) 3D rendering was only 8% faster AT BEST over the SR-2. Other CPU benchmarks were much higher, but 3D rendering was barely noticeable over the Intel 5680 CPUs in the SR-2.

Next we tested the SR-X (direct from EVGA). As expected it operated about the same as the Asus Z9PE-D8, BUT where we saw a dramatic difference was the GPU performance! Our Quadro 5000's we put in the SR-X were operating at nearly 1.5 times the speed of both the SR-2 and the Z9PE-D8. Again though, 3D render times were only 8% over the SR-2 with 5680's (tested with the E5-2687w CPUs).

Recommendation: The SR-2 is STILL the best for the buck. If you need the extra 5-10% for 3D rendering, go SR-