Posted on Monday, January 16 2012 @ 22:51 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report spotted EVGA's SR-X at CES 2012, you can check it out
over here.
This enthusiast board takes two Sandy Bridge-E Xeon processors.
The new SR-X retains the dual-Xeon design of its forebear but swaps that board's LGA1366 sockets for compatibility with Intel's 2011-pin Sandy Bridge-E silicon. Alas, you won't be able to plug a couple of desktop-oriented CPUs like the Core i7-3960X into the SR-X; it's designed for Xeons exclusively. Just two Sandy Bridge-E based Xeons offer plenty of PCI Express 3.0 connectivity, allowing the SR-X to serve its seven expansion slots without tapping the PCIe lanes built into the chipset. EVGA does use a PLX switch chip to split the PCIe 3.0 lanes between the multiple slots, though.
On the chipset front, the board features an "Intel C600" platform hub that looks an awful like what the X79 should have been. See that pair of SAS connectors in the bottom right-hand corner of the board? It seems Intel has resolved the storage-controller issues that left the X79 with no more SATA ports than a run-of-the-mill desktop chipset.
