Pros: This is a very solidly constructed workstation platform. All of the fans are variable speed, the power supply is both quiet and high efficiency, and there is plenty of internal space. The lowest 5 SATA drive slots are wired to the motherboard and all 8 drive slots can be used if you add another controller or get the motherboard version that supports SAS drives.

Cons: It really should have come with all 4 mid-plane fans instead of only 2. The 2 additional fan locations were not blanked off so air recirculation may occur instead of flowing through the chassis. You can easily remedy this by purchasing 2 additional fans from numerous on-line vendors (NewEgg doesn't carry these fans).

Overall Review: I have 9 total disk drives installed; 5 1 TB SATA and 4 128 GB SSD. 24 GB of DDR3-1333 and 2 Nehalem Xeon CPUs, a PCIe X16 graphics card and a 3ware 9650SE RAID card. Everything works flawlessly; I could not be any happier with this system. Since there are multiple fan speed profiles available, you may elect to use this as a server, despite some reviewer claims.

Pros: Solid system, handles our Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software without a problem.

Cons: This is a great system, however, I am not pleased with SuperMicro's RMA service. This system was running for about a week, and then we got an alarm stating that there was a power issue with the power supply. I contacted SM and they said v2.0 power supplies were defective and stated in an email that v2.1 would correct this. They sent a replacement, except they sent another v2.0, now I have to pay shipping to send this unit back. Terrible service on SM's behalf.

Pros: Quiet!!! It runs almost silent and has amazingly good airflow. Pick up some extra fans if you want redundency but they probably won't help much. The stock fans dump heat out the back and internal temps stay low. Loads of RAM, SAS backplane included, PRM Fans, easy to setup, CPU Fans included, Gobs of processing power for all your VM's, or whatever you decide to run. A steal for what you can dump into it and it works out of the box.

Cons: Single PSU (Although it is a monster and has redundant fans) If you decide to purchase a seperate card for RAID be sure to grab some extra long SATA Cables. I had to grab a 36" one to connect my SSD from an open top bay, to the 6GB/s Raid card. But it was worth it :-) Hard Drive cabling is a bit messy trying to get cables routed between the backplane and the center fans is a little tricky.

Overall Review: Don't splurge on 1333GHz DDR3 without checking your processor's memory speed. Take some time to RTM. It's all in there but some things like how to slot 6 sticks of RAM took a bit figure out. Memory slots aren't well labled on the board..

Pros: Once I got it going it runs very well and very quite. Supermicro support is very nice and helped me the entire time(Newegg refused to lift a finger to help me). This is a 5 star product. The support I got from Supermicro made up for any downfalls of the product itself.

Cons: Came with a bent cpu pin I was told to go through supermicro to fix it. sent it in and the power supply was also bad and newegg told me they will not rma it had to send it to supermicro to fix it 3 months after I bought it. The support I got from Supermicro made up for the downfalls of the product itself. The support I got from newegg makes me want to give it 0 but that is not fair to the product.

Overall Review: My rating is based off of the product and not from the support I got from newegg. Newegg charged me twice for this server and got an overdraft. Newegg refused to refund me never shopped on newegg since. Newegg's rating 0-5 this server 5-5

Pros: Worked out-of-the-box, Very quiet, Very low heat output, roomy box with ample room for cables, addon cards, etc.

Cons: Very large box, 45.5 in long 17.75 in high, But it's a workstation...right? Difficult to add in DVD drive. Need extra long sata cable to reach top of box(ie 36"). Had to add 3ware card to use all eight drives.

Overall Review: My config: 2 Xeon E5620, 24GB Crucial DDR3 1066 Model CT3KIT51272BA1067 (sold at newegg), 3ware 9650SE-4LPML, VisionTek 900307 Radeon HD 4670, Western Digital RE4 WD5003ABYX, Make sure you check your processor for memory supported before you buy. Had problems loading drivers for Redhat, switched to Win7 professional and everything loaded perfectly. Using this box for work and a virtual server. Running four VM's; two Win7 vms and two Ubuntu Vms. Can run all simultaneously with no hiccups to the host. This buld was a little pricey but hey it now equals five computers with room to grow. This is a great machine!!

Pros: Rock solid construction. Case is easily over 60lbs. Very tidy cabling, all out of the way and tucked in. Easy drive swapping. I'm running it with 2 Xeon 5650's and 24gb of kingston (6x4gb) on windows 7 ultimate 64 and I do 3d animation and rendering, and i have yet to see this thing bog down. I've had 128 million polygons in my viewport in Cinema 4d without "out of memory" errors.

Cons: This was my first "serious" workstation build, and I was a bit intimidated by it when it came, especially after installing the components and hooking it up, and pressing the power button, only to have it do nothing for about 5 seconds before powering on. (I'm hoping that this is normal, I can't find anything about it in the manual, the support there is a little thin.)

Overall Review: I wanted to protect this investment, so i also got a UPS with puresine wave output, but I had a heck of a time figuring out what wattage rating to get it for, since the PSU on this is 865W. I wound up buying one that was for 1000W, but as it turns out, with the 5650's, RAM, and 3 HD's, when the CPU's are running at full load (when i'm rendering), the system is only demanding about 290W. at idle its about 140W

Pros: Supermicro puts that chassis together and cables the inside nicely. Plenty of room for GFX cards, hard drives, ROMs, etc. It's also very quiet even after I installed the high speed fans from SuperMicro to cool the Adaptec RAID card.

Cons: RAM compatibility. As with all SuperMicro motherboards, ONLY buy RAM off the tested memory list. Not doing so will cause many headaches. I have 24GB installed of which only 16GB is recognized. This is Kingston RAM from their list I just haven't had time to contact their support, which is poor.

Overall Review: These are great platforms to use for high-end workstations as opposed to buying something pre-made from Dell, HP, etc. You have much more freedom to customize and are not locked into proprietary hardware or power limitations. Not to mention, it's less expensive to go this route.

Pros: This build quality of this server is excellent and is very roomy. It's very well designed, easy to work on and has very few, if any, sharp edges. The server is also extremely quiet. It wouldn't be a problem having it next to a desk at all.

Cons: Some trouble with the drive activity lights while set up as a RAID array. They'll blink red on every reboot until I open the Intel software and set the activity lights on each drive. It doesn't affect the operation really, but seeing drive led's blinking red doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies. Even though there are 6 SATA ports on the MB, only 5 are connected to the backplane (one is for the CD\DVD drive) No onboard video, but then again, it's a workstation so it's not really a con, just an extra thing to buy. Supermicro support is touch-and-go, it depends on who you speak to when you call.

Overall Review: Overall I'm very happy with this build. I'm running it as a test server running Hyper-V with dual Nehalems, 24GB RAM and 4X640GB WD Black's in a RAID10 set. The server is very fast, but I wish the storage was a bit faster. Although, 150MB/sec sustained sequential write isn't horrible with 4 SATA drives and an onboard controller. If I had the budget, I would have bought the 8XSAS version. Maybe I'll try a RAID card to see if that helps.