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I've never bought a motherboard before which included heat sinks. This one has two beefy heat sinks which are fine for running the Xeons via passive cooling, but I went a bit further, and zip-tied two 120mm fans together to blow air through the fins of the sinks. The setup is very cool and practically silent due to the large sleeved bearing Scythe fans. I was worried at first that the north bridge heat sink would inhibit the installation of a consumer gaming GPU, but the clearance is perfect. SuperMicro does have an updated BIOS available on their website and it results in a faster boot time for the board, but it does require a MSDOS or FreeDOS bootable USB (or other bootable media) with the driver and executable saved to it. A few gripes I have with the board are: 1. It doesn't have SATA III 6gb/s, but instead the slower SATA II 3gb/s 2. It doesn't have an on-board sound processor, a PCI sound card is required for sound output. 3. It has no USB 3.0 headers or ports, and only 2 rear USB 2.0 ports. 4. Though the Xeon X5650 is unlocked, this board will not allow a higher multiplier than 20 (2.67GHz), which means overclocking is not possible with this board.* An X58 chipset motherboard is recommended for overclocking this CPU. *A Chinese modder was able to modify the board to allow overclocking, but that's well above my skill.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
This can accommodate two Xeon 55xx or 56xx CPUs and up to 96GB of RAM. The Intel Northbridge chip can get hot when both CPU sockets are populated. I put an extra case fan I had lying around inside the case directed at the Northbridge heatsink and that made a huge difference. Now the CPU fans are quiet and inside my Fractal Design R4 case it is nearly silent. One thing about this motherboard: it is not quite standard ATX. The standard ATX motherboard standoffs do not all line up with the holes in this board. If you do not remove the extra standoffs from the case before installing this board, one of them may short out the board such that only 1 CPU will work. This is an obscure caveat but if you are buying it on eBay, chances are you'll be trying to install it in an ATX case. Good luck and enjoy!Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Everything I was expecting
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
I bought this board to put in a desktop case with 2 x XEON processors for games use. There were several technical issues to overcome some of which I was expecting and some that I was not. 1. The 650 Watt PSU I bought only had one processor connector. Luckily you can buy adaptor cable to provide a second one. 2. The case which I bought (Bitfenix Neos) had fixed system board mounting posts. This system board had no holes which lined up with two of these post which would have caused a short circuit as they contacted with the underside of the motherboard so I had to drill them out of the case to remove the danger. 3. The PCI-E slot for the video card has no retaining clip to help hold the card in place, which may be problematic later. 4. Even with the latest firmware, there is a curious issue whereby if the chipset gets a little too warm (more than about 50c) then the CPU fans speed up causing a noise issue!!! The only solution I could find so far is to direct a sixth case fan directly at the chipset chips which are the two large chips with low heat sinks behind the PCI slots. Larger profile heat sinks may have avoided this requirement. 5. Only supports USB 2 and SATA 2 so I installed a USB 3 PCIe card and a SATA 3 PCIe card. 6. No onboard sound but a USB SoundBlaster play sorted that. After all these changes the system now works quite rapidly with a GTX-460 graphic card and 32GB RAM.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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