Jacob Freeman of EVGA Google + fame recently posted a teaser photo of a certain shiny piece of X79 chipset baked silicon in the form of a new SR3 Super Record series motherboard. This monster of a board is packed to the brim with features, and mid tower cases need not apply.
Starting at the top of the board and working our way down, we are presented with not one but two socket 2011 Sandy Bridge-E Xeon processor sockets! One processor will have access to eight DDR3 DIMM slots while the other will have access to four DDR3 DIMM slots. While the RAM configuration may seem odd, EVGA wanted to make the transition from the boards SR2 predecesor as easy as possible, by allowing users to transfer all 12, triple channel DIMMs to the new SR3 motherboard. When all 12 RAM slots are populated, the board will run in triple channel mode, and when four or eight slots are populated, the motherboard will utilize the new quad channel interface. The RAM will be fed power via a eight phase PWM (pulse width modulation) circuitry. The board also features two eight pin EPS and two six pin PCI-E connectors, and seven PCI-E 3.0 slots that are all capable of running at least PCI-E 3.0 x8 and four of them are capable of providing PCI-E 3.0 x16 bandwidth, more than enough for even the beefiest SLI setup.
On the storage and IO front, the SR3 motherboard has 14 SATA ports, HD Audio via six 3.5mm jacks, USB 3.0 ports (the total amount is unclear), and eSATA support. The bottom right corner of the board lies a handy diagnostic screen to report error codes. Further, the motherboard will come with the new UEFI BIOS. Mr. Freeman states that the x79 motherboard is fully furnished with solid state capacitors from Sanyo (specifically POSCAP).
In short, this motherboard is a total beast. Please excuse me as I try to remove my jaw from the floor cartoon style.
forgive me from sounding
forgive me from sounding cynical, but if you are spending 700$ on a motherboard, cant you spend an extra 100 for a good 4th pair of DDR3 sticks?
heh, I would think so,
heh, I would think so, especially with RAM being dirt cheap!
um……why? I have NO
um……why? I have NO idea….not a single one, why you’d need 80 gigs of ram. Options are always good.
You gamers have no idea…
You gamers have no idea… This is a xeon board… As in workstation/ server. I would most definitely like 80GB of RAM.
Can’t argue with the server
Can’t argue with the server usage but for gamers …
*cough* RAMDrive *cough*
wow this makes me wanna get a
wow this makes me wanna get a caselabs.net cube case. You guys should throw them a review/article.
… and whats with the triple
… and whats with the triple channel limitation… sounds a bit ass backwards in my opinion considering one standalone processor is supposed to be quad channel.
It just doesnt make sense.
2 dimms per channel for the first processor, and 1 dim per channel for the second… that would still be quad channel support. So what crazy math are they trying to pull that makes it only triple channel?
I’m not sure myself; however,
I’m not sure myself; however, I think they are going 12 DIMMs (say, from a triple channel system) would be 3 x 4GB. I want to assume that you could still do quad channel with say 4 x 4GB and 8 x 2GB to get all quad channel… I really don’t know and they aren’t really saying much, just teasing us with shiny pictures. I’ll see if I can get some clarification, but I make no promises 😛 You can definitely get the system to be quad channel for both procs, but it’s not clear if you would need the same amount of RAM on both (ie, whether you could do 8x4GB for the 8 DIMM proc and 4x4GB for the 4 DIMM proc and do quad channel or if you need both sides to equal… and if not as long as each proc can independantly do quad channel why they couldn’t..ahhh I dunno 🙁
I guess it would also depend
I guess it would also depend on the bridging chipset in use.
but as far as it stands… it would be pretty dumb to assume that someone willing to spend $650-750 on a mobo, and almost a grand on each processor wouldnt buy some more ram as it’s quite cheap these days.
All in all, EVGA seems to be causing everyone to scratch their heads and say “wth?”… or their marketing department doesnt know what is exactly going on with their products in development/testing.
heh, that last part might
heh, that last part might have something to do with it, maybe this is just a matter of something getting lost in translation between the engineering team and marketing team.
So it’s looking like it’s not
So it’s looking like it’s not going to be possible to do 12 DIMMS quad channel, it’s only quad channel with 4 (2 per CPU) or 8 (4 per CPU) DIMMs. I suppose it’s a matter of thinking of it as a 8 DIMM slot board if you want Quad Channel, with the other DIMM slots just being there for backwards compatibility.
The new Intel processors have
The new Intel processors have the memory controller on the chip, instead of using a NB.
Therefore Processor 0 will be Quad channel (1×4 or 2×4)
And Processor 1 will be Quad Channel (1×4) And since they controllers are per chip each one will be independent of the other.
They went with the 12 DIMMS so that existing SR-2 owners would be able to carry over.
did any body notice he is a
did any body notice he is a relative to Gordon Freeman or am I just easily amused
lol, is he really? Cool 🙂
lol, is he really? Cool 🙂
did any body notice he is a
did any body notice he is a relative to Gordon Freeman or am I just easily amused
this is ridiculous .
this is ridiculous . motherboards should be all on a big chip. all intergrated. you can see its where we are going.
Well, by my recollection.
Well, by my recollection. The Reference design and or Mobo size couldn’t handle the extra ram-slots… Instead of saying that they could not get the extra slots to fix in the E-atx form factor, their marketing team decided to sell it as a feature… Sad, but I see it all the time in the marketing biz.