For these past 6 months we have been using the Supermicro X8SAX mainboard as one of our primary workstation mainboards. Reasoning why, complete and utter stability. Bios updates you can count upon one hand from release. A bios that is robust and stable, a mainboard that anything can be thrown at it and it just keeps going. You cannot ask anymore than this what Supermicro has to offer, hence our reasoning for it being in situ. We have had many requests these last few months for some facts and figures on the actual boards performance in other areas so within page 5 we ran the latest version SiSoftware Sandra 2010 and produced a few substantial tests which back up soundly what we have been saying.
The mainboard supports a host of functionality that is too long to list though to summarise
Supermicro motherboards based on the Intel X58 Express chipset support Intel’s Core™ i7 and Xeon® 5600/5500/3600/3500 series processors in the LGA 1366 socket. With features that include support for 36 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, up to 24 GB DDR3 memory, and optional integrated IPMI 2.0 support, these boards deliver the highest performance for 1U, 2U+ and pedestal form factors.