Supermicro X9DRH-7TF Preview Ultimate Server Motherboard
15 May 2012 Source: http://www.servethehome.com
Just spotted this new board over at Supermicro, I can only think that this motherboard was released after my comment on the Tyan S7053 server board, being my board of choice currently. I have a feeling this motherboard could replace the S7053 and take the overall crown of king of all Intel Xeon E5 LGA 2011 server boards. Supermicro and Tyan have the server boards pretty well sewn up unless you go to a pre-built Dell, HP or IBM server. Let's have a quick look at this monster server board.
The motherboard fits E-ATX a nice standard size that should fit almost all larger cases. It should be noted that this board is not recommended for 1U enclosures because one would not be able to take advantage of all of the expansion slots in a 1U chassis. In 2U and larger enclosurse this will fit as snug as a bug in a rug. Tower based servers should have no issues either.
The 16 DIMM slots provide for a maximum of 512GB ECC DDR3 Registered DIMMs or 128MB ECC UDIMMs (Unbuffered) memory. This should be ample for today's and the foreseeable needs even for server running many virtual machines. By not going with a twenty DIMM solution, Supermicro was able to keep the form factor relatively standard.
SAS/SATA, this board is very well equiped with both, especially SAS2/SATA3. This motherboard comes with a LSI SAS 2208 based SAS controller, meaning there are eight 6.0gbps SAS II/SATA III drives that can be controlled directly via the motherboard's SFF-8087 connectors, more via an expander should more drives be needed form a single controller. This LSI SAS 2208 controller is connected to CPU1 via PCIe 3.0 x8 lanes, which will give it the highest possible throughput currently available. Not having seen the motherboard live or mentioned in the specs, but this will likely have an onboard cache, with a size unknown it does however have 2x BBU options, one a watch battery on the board for the LSI chipset, and one connector for the cache backup battery. The LSI SAS 2208 supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 60, being a dual core ROC device it will do really well with parity RAID operations (e.g. for RAID 5 and 6.) The Intel Patsburg PCH brings another two SATA3 connectors and another six SATA2 connectors.
To find out more about the Supermicro X9DRH-7TF click here
To read the full review click here