Supermicro X10DAX (Intel C612) Workstation Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications, and Packaging Today I'm taking a look at a motherboard for those that need that extra bit of power behind the curtains for heavy workstation or server tasks. The Supermicro X10DAX is aimed at workstations, but it would work well as a basis for a server as well with the features at hand. In the end, as always, it comes down to what tasks the system has to perform. Supermicro's X10DAX is a dual CPU motherboard with plenty of memory and multi-GPU support. The motherboard supports up to 1TB ECC DDR4 2133MHz LRDIMM memory over its 16 DIMM memory banks as well as Triple-SLI setup or Quadro-SLI with dual-GPU graphics cards. Those who will use RDIMMs instead of LRDIMMs will be limited to 512GB maximum memory capacity. The motherboard supports up to two processors from the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family thanks to the Dual Socket R3 (LGA 2011). That means up to 18 cores and 45MB cache per processor which in return equals a lot of power. The chipset is the Intel C612 which by itself provides a lof of features and enhancements over the predecessor. One of the unique features on this motherboard versus its brothers is the overclocking features thanks to the BCLK settings in the BIOS and Supermicro has dubbed this Hyper-Speed on their motherboards. This will allow you to get that extra power from your system when it is needed and if it is needed. A great bonus that surely will be appreciated by many of the people purchasing this motherboard. Next to the Hyper-Speed technology, the Supermicro X10DAX also includes Hyper-Turbo mode which allows more power to be delivered to the CPUs and thereby maximize the CPU Turbo Mode frequency. Supermicro also made sure that the motherboard is Thunderbolt 2 ready, but that's an optional add-on you'll have to get. Since this is a workstation board, it also comes with an onboard sound card. It could, for example, get a pretty hard job to edit videos without sound. The Supermicro X10DAX provides onboard 7.1 channel HD audio for just that reason. Storage connection isn't a problem either and we don't have to pay for an extra SAS controller here that we probably don't need in a workstation. Ten SATA3 ports, of which two supports SuperDOMs, should be plenty for your storage needs. If you need more than that, you'll most likely have a server located somewhere anyway and thus eliminating the need again. You also get a Type-A USB 2.0 connector on the motherboard, placed right next to the SATA connectors. Since the SATA3 ports are controlled by Intel's C612 chipset, we have RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 at our disposal on this board. Dual Gigabit LAN is included thanks to a couple of Intel i210 network controllers, but we don't find any dedicated IPMI on this motherboard. The PCI Express connectors available are three PCI-E 3.0 x16, two PCI-E 3.0 x8, and one PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8). With such an amount of power at our disposal, we also need proper cooling. The Supermicro X10DAX has eight 4-pin fan headers that support tachometer monitors, status monitoring, and PWM fans. There are no dedicated CPU fan headers, so you can use any two of the eight for that. Specifications The specifications are taken directly from the manufacturers homepage and are as such subject to change in possible future revisions. Key Features Supports Hyper-Speed Supports 3-way Geforce SLI Supports 4-way SLI support with dual GPU graphics cards Dual socket R3 (LGA 2011) supports Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 family; QPI up to 9.6GT/s Intel C612 chipset 16x DIMM slots for up to 1TB ECC DDR4 2133MHz memory 3 PCI-E 3.0 x16, 2 PCI-E 3.0 x8, and 1 PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8) slot Intel i210 Dual port GbE LAN 10x SATA3 (6Gbps) ports (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10) 6x USB 3.0 (4 rear, 2 via header), 5x USB 2.0 (2 rear, 2 via header, 1 Type A) 7.1 HD Audio with optical S/PDIF Packaging and Accessories The box for the Supermicro X10DAX is a default layout for the entire line-up and as such presents key features from all boards. While we can spot such things as 40GbE here, we won't find it on this board. The rear of the box details the different boards from Supermicro in this category for easy comparison. Inside the box, next to the motherboard itself, we find six SATA3 cables and an IO shield with proper padding and yet unopened ports. Remember to only pop the ones that the motherboard actually has. Included is also a Quick Start Guide that will show you the headers and jumper positions, how to install your memory depending on the amount of modules you are using, as well as front header layout and other vital information for installation. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis It is time to take a closer look at the Supermicro X10DAX and one of the main features on this motherboard is the CPU and memory support. We get two LGA 2011 R3 sockets, each with eight memory slots for a total of up to 36 cores and 1TB memory. That should be sufficient for most workstation loads. There isn't anything that stands out beside the support in this area, but I would like to point out the great and clear labeling of the DIMM slots in between the CPU areas. It is easy to read and quick to setup thanks to this. No need to look up the right DIMM slots in the motherboard if you aren't going to populate them all. Opening up the CPU socket, we see a normal layout. We can also mount normal sized CPU coolers on this motherboard and don't require the slim versions that some do. This adds a lot to the compatibility list and allows you to choose from a lot more products. Moving on from RAM and CPU and we find the power connectors. They are all located at the top inner corner, seen from a normal case mount perspective, and include a 24-pin connector for the motherboard and two 8-pin connectors for power supply to the processors. The PIN setup between the power connectors and the DIMM slots seen below is the front-panel header for power, reset, and LEDs. This is a little bit of an unusual placement for it, but I kind of like it. The ten SATA ports are located at the bottom of the motherboard and the two yellow ones in the middle are the ones with DOM support. You can also see the DOM power headers right next to the ports. To the right of the SATA3 connectors, we see the A-Type USB 2.0 connector that can be used for a permanent storage for various purposes. This could be a diagnosis boot drive, drivers drive, backup, or OS. The choice is yours. There isn't much to say to the PCI Express slots in itself, they are the normal ones placed in a normal way. There aren't any headers, jumpers, or other options between the slots that would be majorly blocked by added cards, and that is nice. The bottom and top slots could make a tight fit when accessing the jumpers and headers there, but it should be manageable without taking everything apart as you would have to on some boards. The third-party chips are located around the PCI Express slots and we see the Realtek ALC888 7.1 HD audio chip as well as the Intel i210 LAN chips and the Lattice and SMCI chips for monitoring purposes. You can also spot the SPDIF headers in the shot below. The last part to show is the rear IO panel. It is simple, but it provides us with enough and pretty much everything we need. First we have a duality of two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, next are the audio jacks and optical audio connector, then we see the two Intel RJ45 ports, before everything is finalized with two more USB 3.0 ports. The Test System and Test Software As we're trying to branch out with more relevant reviews for all of our readers, we've started this new section with server and workstation grade motherboards and we've also begun reviewing workstation systems such as the Boston Venom 3401-7T. To test a motherboard like this, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance. While the benchmarks in themselves test the actual connected components such as CPU and memory instead of the motherboard itself, the results will give us comparable figures, allowing you as the reader to pick the best option for your needs. To test a motherboard like this, we need a lot of extra components and we'll be using the same each time. You can find a complete list of them below. System components CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 RAM: Crucial DDR4 2133 MHz (8x 16GB) SSD: Micron M500DC 800GB System Drive PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1200W Cooler: Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of the system performance. Software Windows Server 2012 R2 AIDA64 Engineer Edition Cinebench R11.5 Cinebench R15.0 Geekbench 3 PCMark PerformanceTest 8.0 SPECwpc SiSoftware Sandra SuperPi Mod 1.9 WP wPrime 2.10 There are more components needed such as a switch to connect the network ports to and storage drives to test the different connections that the motherboard has to offer. Network components Netgear ProSafe GS724TPS Smart Switch Storage Drives Angelbird SSD2go Pocket 512GB USB 3.0 SSD Intel 750 SSD 1.2TB PCIe NVMe SSD Toshiba HG6 512GB SATA3 SSD BIOS On Supermicro's X10DAX we find an ordinary looking AMI BIOS, just as we want it on a motherboard like this. It is easy to find what you're looking for and change the settings you want to. Advanced The advanced tab is where you will find almost all settings, as you can see in the photo below. I will be taking you along each of those screens to show what can be set and what not. The SMC Performance Tuning page allows you to enable the two Supermicro technologies, Hyper-Speed and Hyper-Turbo for CPU overclocking. We can further access and change the memory timing and tune those to the perfect settings for us. The boot features are also added under the advanced tab and that is a bit unusual. We also have a boot tab on its own, but that is kept more simple due to most settings being here. We can watch and configure the CPU configuration from the same named tab. The next parts we can edit is the chipset for both the north and southbridge, starting with the north bridge. We got the IIO Configuration, QPI Configuration, and Memory Configuration here. The South Bridge is a bit more simple from a settings point of view and only has the ones seen below. SATA and sSATA configuration look like they always do on our Intel based boards, not much to say to that. The Supermicro X10DAX features a lot of PCI Express lanes and slots, and those need to be managed at times too. Moving on, we find the ACPI settings as well as the hardware monitoring that provides temperatures, voltage, and speed for all relevant parts of the system. As previously mentioned, the motherboard is Thunderbolt 2 ready and we find all the settings for this too. Keep in mind, this requires an add-in board to work. Events The next tab is for events, we can change in the settings as well as view the current Smbios Event logs. Security is kept ot a basic with user and administrator password abilities, then again - what more can we expect from a BIOS. Boot We've already seen most boot settings, but the priorities have their own page here. The final page is the Save and Exit that also allows you to override the default boot order with another connected device. CPU Performance AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 Engineer provides several methods to measure system performance. These benchmarks are synthetic, ie. the results show only the theoretical (maximum) performance of the system. In contrast to application tests, synthetic benchmarks do not tend to reflect the "real world" performance of the computer. These benchmarks provide a quick and easy comparison between computer states, e.g. when certain parameters (CPU clock speed, memory timings, etc) change in system configuration. Cinebench R11.5 & R15.0 Cinebench is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. Cinebench is a perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms, and best of all: It's completely free. wPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. SuperPi Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits. Memory Performance For our memory tests we use the built-in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer, Geekbench 3, PerformanceTest, and SiSoftware Sandra. A wider array of tests will give us a wider array of results. AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 Engineer provides several methods to measure system performance. These benchmarks are synthetic, ie. the results show only the theoretical (maximum) performance of the system. In contrast to application tests, synthetic benchmarks do not tend to reflect the "real world" performance of the computer. These benchmarks provide quick and easy comparison between computer states, e.g. when certain parameters (CPU clock speed, memory timings, etc) change in system configuration. PerformanceTest 8.0 PerformanceTest is a fast, easy to use software benchmarking tool that allows everybody to quickly assess the performance of their PC and compare it to a number of standard 'baseline' computer systems. PerformanceTest allows you to compare the performance of your machine, measure the effect of configuration changes and upgrades, and make objective independent measurements on which to base your purchasing decision. Geekbench 3 Geekbench 3 is Primate Labs' cross-platform processor benchmark. It has a multi-scoring system for both single-core and multicore performance and workloads that simulate real-world scenarios. It is however the STREAM based memory tests that we will be using here. SiSoftware Sandra Memory Latency Storage Performance To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews I use AIDA’s Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run linear read and write tests. We run the benchmark tests on the SATA III and USB 3.0 as well as any other storage options available. For SATA III testing, I'll use a Toshiba HG6 512GB SSD and for USB 3.0 an Angelbird SSD2go Pocket 512GB SSD. The PCIe capabilities are being tested by one of Intel's amazing 750 series SSD 1.2TB PCIe drives. SATA Performance SATA is the somewhat traditional interface used by most drives. The Toshiba HG6 drive might not be the fastest, but it is a workstation drive and as such a good solution for a system build with a motherboard like this. USB 3.0 Performance The USB 3.0 platform is great for quick storage expansion as well as portable drives. It comes closer to an internal drive's performance than the previous versions and is as such a viable option for backup too. I will be using the durable and highly portable Angelbird SSD2go Pocket for these tests. NVMe PCIe Performance NVMe is the next generation of drives and they eliminate the bottlenecks created by the by now old SATA standard. These drives are the future for now and I'll be testing those capabilities with the Intel 750 SSD with 1.2GB capacity. Network Performance For the networking tests I will connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit-enabled Supermicro C7Z97-OCE network and storage test system through a Netgear ProSafe GS724TPS managed switch and run our tests. This setup should present a good real-world performance and give a better result than a direct connection would. I will be performing the network tests as both a single connection and with dynamic link aggregation. LAN Speed Test LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). It does this by building a file in memory, then transfers it both ways without effects of windows file caching and while keeping track of the time. Passmark Performance Test 8 The PassMark Advanced Network Test, a part of PerformanceTest, is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers acts as the server and will wait for a connection while the other computer acts as a client. Teamed Connections System Performance We don't use a dedicated graphics card in this system but rather just test the pure motherboard performance and due to that some tests can't be run. They require a 3D capable graphics card and the onboard solution is merely a 2D solution meant for management. After all, this is a server board. PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0 SPECwpc 1.2 SPECwpc is the first benchmark to measure all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications. The latest version is SPECwpc V1.2 (introduced on June 3, 2015), which extends performance measurement from physical to virtualized workstations. Results from SPECwpc V1.2 are comparable to those from SPEC V1.0.4, but not to any version before that. More than 30 workloads are included in SPECwpc V1.2 to test CPU, graphics, I/O and memory bandwidth. The tests are divided into the application categories listed below. Individual scores are generated for each test and a composite score for each category is generated based on a reference machine, yielding a "bigger is better" result. The reference machine has the following configuration: x3430 processor, 8GB (4x2GB) memory, V4800 graphics, and SATA 7.2k rpm hard disk drive. Power Consumption The power consumption is measured at the power outlet and is as such the power draw from the entire system. Idle and off figures speak for themselves and for the load figures I stress the CPU to 90% and memory to 90% load with OCCT. Final Thoughts & Pricing Pricing At the time of writing this review, the Supermicro X10DAX can be had for $442.99 at NewEgg, £389.74 at LambdaTek, or you can find a good deal through Geizhals starting from €485.20. A very fair price for this motherboard. Overview Supermicro created a great motherboard for those who want maximum performance without paying for all the extras that they'll never need. This is a cut-down to basics, yet feature rich, dual-socket motherboard supporting the latest generation Intel Xeon CPUs with up to 18 cores each. That is a lot of performance, and it can be backed with up to 1TB DDR4 2133MHz memory over the 16 memory slots; serious performance for the serious user. When I say it is a cut-down version, then it's things like IPMI, onboard GPU, SAS controller, and extra LAN controllers, both Gbit and 10Gbase, that aren't present here. We still get a lot of great features such as 3-way SLI and even 4-way SLI when dual-GPU cards are used. There are plenty of PCI-Express slots for those graphics cards and other add-in cards of your choice. You also find dual Intel i210 powered Gigabit Ethernet, plenty of USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, including an onboard Type-A USB port and 7.1 Channel Realtek ALC888 audio. The Intel C612 chipset takes care of most of the features, including the 10 SATA3 ports that allow you to attach plenty of storage and set it up in RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 modes. Two of these 10 ports also support DOMs and the motherboard has DOM power for both of them. The Supermicro X10DAX also features a great hardware monitoring for all relevant parts, from voltages and speeds to temperatures and overheat protection. We saw a really great performance from this board and those benchmark apps that really support dual-cores also showed a great scaling of the two and one that comes very close to 100%. We also saw a great performance when we looked at single core performance where the X10DAX scored better that what I've previously tested in most tests. All that power comes at an increased power consumption due to the two CPUs, and that isn't something one should take lightly, as it is quite a bit more. Of course, this isn't much of a surprise given that it's running two powerful Xeon processors. Pros: Dual Socket LGA 2011 R3 for up to 18 cores each Supports up to 1TB DDR4 ECC memory Dual Intel i210 LAN 7.1 Audio 3-way and 4-way SLI Supermicro Hyper-Speed and Hyper-Turbo for overclocking Cons: 2 CPUs increase power consumption significantly "If you want a dual socket E-ATX motherboard for the Xeon E5's which performs great and supports plenty of memory, but don't want to pay for extras you don't use, then the Supermicro X10DAX is for you." Thank You Supermicro for providing us with this review sample