EVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard

Conclusions

Wow. With so many features and an impressive size, it is really difficult not to be impressed by this motherboard.

Of course it is targeted to that small niche of super enthusiasts who want to build the fastest PC on Earth. With two Xeon 55xx or 56xx CPUs you will have eight physical cores, but the operating system will recognize your system as having 16 processors due to the Hyper-Threading technology. The motherboard supports up to 48 GB of RAM. And you can install up to four dual-slot video cards to build a four-way SLI or CrossFireX system with all slots working at x16 – usually motherboards that accept three- or four-way SLI/CrossFireX configurations at least one of the slots reduces its speed. That doesn’t happen with this motherboard.

The motherboard itself costs USD 600 and gives us a wide range of CPU selection. You can go "budget" and put two Xeon E5506 at USD 238 each or really go ultra high-end by installing two Xeon X5677 at USD 1,750 each. Plus the price of the video cards, case, power supply, a huge video monitor, and so on. If you are rich and crazy about gaming and overclocking this motherboard may be your opportunity to build the fastest PC in your whole state, just to impress your friends. Normal people like us can only sigh and dream.

As a final note, we think EVGA should improve their manual and website. Lots of information is missing from the manual (e.g., the real PCI Express configuration, a few undocumented jumpers, info about the triple-BIOS feature, info on the EVBot panel) plus the pictures are very low-quality. We think users paying USD 600 on a motherboard deserve better.