Supermicro X10DAX (Intel C612) Workstation Motherboard Review

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