Conclusions

This has been an exceptional first outing of this mainboard and the R & D team from Supermicro should be yelling from the rooftops with its resilient success here today.  We have thrown just about everything at it and it keeps coming back for more without batting an eyelid.   Solid in construction and an end users manual that maintains meticulous accuracy of explanation on how to successfully set-up the mainboard to its optimal performance.  There is as we stipulated early on within the introduction much more to this mainboard than meets the eye.  The overclocking within the board will be easy enough for most who are experienced within this remit.  Fun they will have.

Normally with new mainboards of this nature we most always see a niggle or 2 and a swift call to the right support team sees an update fire into place very quickly to resolve the issue.  Not so here.  First time right which is very rare in today's massive choices of hardware.   Kudos must go to the bios engineering team within Supermicro for achieving a feat of this magnitude.

The results shown within are good within many areas and to recap from earlier in a more concise consolidated format utilising the ATI FirePro V8700.

What of 64-bit mode results, these will follow very soon indeed and give you an idea on how well the board does run within this Operating System.  But today's outing was to prioritise within 32-bit as many companies still rely heavily upon this operating system for many means.   Watch this space soon for a swift update.

Cinebench 10.  The OpenGL results these are much better than what we would have expected, this is a testament to both Supermicro and ATI as to gain results like this much collaboration between the two companies has to be completed.   In previous outings on Intel's Smackover we were pleasantly surprised at both the OpenGL performance and the Multi CPU render times.   A 55 second render out time of the test scene is something to be admired, though with the aid of the supersonic VelociRaptors it is easy to see why.

The results from SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ has been that spooked us the most, to date we have never seen such very high scoring from a ATI FirePro professional graphics card.  To check sum it was no abnormality within the result we completed a fresh run iaw the fairplay rules and the results came in extremely close to the first run.   Some very happy people within the ATI professional graphics card team will be hoping for good bonuses this year.  We knew that the driver was to be good but did not expect it to be this good.  

What of cost and availability of this new wondrous bit of equipment fresh from the pedigree stable of Supermicro?    At going to print the current pricing of the Supermicro X8SAX flies through the starters gate at $400 USD, €270 Euros or £245 UKP (before taxes and shipping).   Shipping, quoted as now from many sources within industry, therefore to be certain for some very excited end users Christmas has come early.   The pricing of this mainboard has been very aggressively set to compete with other manufacturers but with a few more bells and whistles for comfort.   Isn't it great not having to worry about those precious 64-bit cards hooked up to those massive raid arrays already built in place waiting to uptake the power of i7.

Penultimately, we will be sad to see this mainboard make its way back to Supermicro as it has provided us with a platform of first choice which we would have liked to see remain within our arsenal of test systems.    Though looking on the bright side of life we should be seeing very soon the next phase of excitement with the Dual Nehalem Platforms and what a bang these will bring to the fore.

The final thoughts.   This has been one of the best single CPU mainboards we have encountered in a very long time.  It has the ultimate performance and flexibility in the marketplace that is going to be very hard to match by any other mainboard maker out in the community.  Much thought has gone into the actual design and upgrade paths for peripherals that are not only a year old.   Within the introduction we stated that here is the gold standard.  A standard of this magnitude deserves only the best award possible - our Editors Choice.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Mainboard and System Build Pictures
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Benchmarks/Software Used
Page 4 - Sandra 2009
Page 5 - Hard Drive Tests
Page 6 - ATI's FirePro V8700 NON ECC RESULTS - Autodesk
Page 7 - MAXON CINEBENCH 10 and Bentley MicroStation V8 XM Graphics Benchmark v1.0.0.5
Page 8 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and SPECviewperf 10 ®
Page 9 - Conclusions