Supermicro X11SPI-TF LGA-3647 Motherboard Review

Bohs Hansen / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts & Pricing

Pricing

At the time of writing this review, the Supermicro X11SPI-TF motherboard isn’t listed on the UK version of Amazon yet. The US version does have it, and there it can be yours for $539.95.

Overview

Supermicro’s X11SPI-TF is a great motherboard which has been cut down to the basics. When I say that, I mean that it doesn’t come with a ton of features which you won’t need. However, it does have all that you do need, making it a perfect design. We get eight DDR4 memory slots and one CPU socket along with two 16x and three 8x PCIe slots. With them, you can run a 16x/16x/0x/8x/4x or a 16x/8x/8x/8x/4x setup. Perfect for high-performance add-in cards, may they be GPUs, controllers, or drives.

Connection Options

While you can add plenty of extra storage ports through add-in cards, you might not need to. The motherboard comes with 10 SATA3 ports, 2 of them SuperDOM, with RAID 50/60 support. There’s also an onboard USB Type-A port and an M.2 PCIe slot for more storage options. However, you won’t find any U.2 or SATA-Express slots on this board which wouldn’t be utilised anyway. If U.2 is needed, it will be handled by an HBA.

Externally, the Supermicro X11SPI-TF follows the same trend. You get a couple of USB ports which you’ll need, but not too many. The Gigabit Ethernet has also been left out entirely in favour of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. With that available, no one will use the Gigabit ports. Less hardware means a lower price, and that’s a win. With that said, there is a Gigabit Ethernet port, but that is for the remote management interface. The board comes with an ASMedia AST2500 chip for this, which includes Ethernet and D-Sub VGA output.

Performance

With this being the first review in this socket and CPU generation, it is difficult to put a whole lot of perspective on the performance. With that said, the pure hardware and basic performance figures do speak for themselves. This is a strong competitor and a worthy heart of any server.

Pros

10 SATA3 ports (2 SuperDOM) with RAID 50/60 support
Onboard USB Type-A and M.2 slot
Up to 1TB DDR4 memory
Dual 10GbE Intel NICs
IPMI2.0, KVM with dedicated LAN, NMI, SPM, SUM, SuperDoctor 5, and Watchdog
ATX Form-factor

Cons

none

“Supermicro designed a great and to-the-point motherboard here. The X11SPI-TF has everything you’ll want and none of the things you don’t want.”