X8DAi - The Crunchinator

The stable door has now been fully  opened and the pedigree stallions are charging out the door from all sectors supporting Intel's new Nehalem EP solution.  There are many options now becoming available from many mainboard makers - some very interesting, some following the laid down baseline standard layout directly from Intel's reference board the S5520SC.   The last few weeks have many sitting up in complete and utter awe at the complete brute force of computational power this combination has to offer.

Supermicro in it's normal fashionable offerings have in this instance completely surpassed themselves embracing this technology  with a massive offering to all walks of life many different solutions to meet all pockets.   There is an endless list which we will cover further down the page.

Today as our want we take a look at the new Supermicro X8DAi workstation mainboard.  Fundamentally a board that will suit many pockets and allow many to build firm long term reusable in house solutions.  This is a mainboard that has many optional upgrade paths allowing so many choices to be made even after it reaches its end of life on what it first set out to complete.

Having looked very closely at both Supermicro's X8SAX and C7X58 mainboards, and please these recall that both these mainboards put up a incredible showing for a first outing.  Will the X8DAi have the same momentous impact on us like they had.  Time will tell later on within the article but if our prior experience was anything to go by then we are positive it will be a winner.

So lets look into briefly what Supermicro have to say on their new offerings (Our thanks here to Supermicro's PR)

Supermicro Solutions based on Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500/3500 Series

To equip our customers with the best time-to-market advantage possible, Supermicro has provided an extensive selection of motherboards, servers, workstations and blade systems optimized for the new Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series in parallel with the chipset and processor launches. In addition to unsurpassed performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar, these application-optimized Server Building Block Solutions® also deliver the following feature benefits:

      • Up to 144GB DDR3 Memory Support (via 18 Dimms)
      • Dual IOH-36D to support up to 72 PCI-E Gen 2.0 Links
      • Flexible Combination of UIO Card Support (UIO SAS, 10Gb, 4 X 1Gb, InfiniBand)
      • Award-Winning 1U Twin with DDR and QDR InfiniBand Designs
      • Onboard IPMI 2.0/KVM with dedicated LAN support
      • Onboard SAS 2.0 (6 Gb/s)
      • Robust total solution validation for superior quality

Supermicro's complete line of server, workstation and blade solutions enable the highest system-level efficiency available, increasing the attainable computing power per rack and lowering TCO, while helping to keep our earth green!

With this comes a huge choice of mainboards and ready made solutions therefore lets have a swift count of what's on offer on the mainboard front.

Server Mainboards - 14
U.I.O Mainboards - 3
Twin - 8
SA 2.0 - 2
Workstation Mainboards - 4
Cost Effective  - 8

Therefore we see a grand total of 39 Mainboards which can be found within 30 different ready made solutions to go out the door which looks something like this

1U SuperServer - 12
1U SuperServer Twin - 6
2U SuperServer - 3
2U SuperServer Twin² - 6
4U Tower / Mid-Tower 2
SuperWorkstation - 2

Note - All Twin servers (1U & 2U) listed above use 80PLUS Gold Level power supply.    All 2U Twin² systems have peak performance-per-watt of 375GFLOPS/kW.

As Supermicro clearly stipulated in their opening statement "an extensive selection of mainboards" etc.  They most certainly have got this right, therefore it means in turn solutions for all walks of life and most importantly aggressively and competitively priced mainboards.  The complete "win win scenario" for customers.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Introduction Continued
Page 3 - Mainboard Photographs
Page 4 - System Build Pictures
Page 5 - System Set-Up, Benchmarks and Applications Used
Page 6 - Sandra 2009 SP2
Page 7 - Hard Drive Tests
Page 8 - ATI FirePro V8700 - Cinebench, POV-Ray 3.72 Beta and 3D Studio Max 2009 Scenes
Page 9 - ATI FirePro V8700 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and SPECviewperf® 10.0
Page 10 - NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 - Cinebench, POV-Ray 3.72 Beta and 3D Studio Max 2009 Scenes
Page 11 - NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and SPECviewperf® 10.0
Page 12 - Conclusions and Award