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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||
Every once in a while a product comes along that really gets us worked into a frenzy. Typically, the latest and greatest processors and graphics cards generate a lot of buzz around here, but some other components aren’t always as enticing for one reason or another, like motherboards for example. Don’t get us wrong, we love a great enthusiast-class motherboard with a ton of features as much as the next guy, but the majority of them just don’t have the appeal of new CPU or GPU. Dual socket motherboards have been a mainstay in the workstation market for ages, but they’re not as common in the enthusiast space. So, when we see one, we’re usually excited to check it out.
The EVGA Classified SR-2's specifications hint at the board's extreme nature, but don't tell the whole story by any means. We'll dig deeper on the pages ahead, but first we should talk about the chipset at the heart of the SR-2, Intel's 5520. It, after all, is the foundations that brings all of the board's integrated features together.
The Intel 5520 chipset is somewhat similar to the X58 Express in terms of its features, but it obviously targeted at the high-end workstation market as is evidenced by its multiple QPI links and support for Xeon series processors. Like its desktop-bound counterpart, The 5520 IOH is paired to the ICH10R Southbridge, which adds PCI Express Gen 1, Serial ATA, USB 2.0, and Ethernet connectivity. Due to the fact that Xeon 5500 / 5600 series processors feature integrated on-die memory controllers, the 5520 IOH isn't a traditional Northbridge. It does, however, sport multiple QPI links and 36 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 connectivity. |
| EVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard |
The EVGA Classified SR-2 is one behemoth of a motherboard. At first glance, other than the attractive black-and-red color scheme, the sheer size of the motherboard in comparison to standard ATX offerings is immediately apparent.
The EVGA Classified SR-2 is an HPTX form factor motherboard, measuring 13.6” long by 15” wide. It is absolutely huge. As such, it will not fit in any run of the mill full tower. More on that later though.
Although the sockets have 1366 pins like their desktop counterparts, the SR-2 requires coolers designed for Xeon processors, which have four retentions screws, rather than the push pins we’re used to on the desktop. While we’re talking cooling, the SR-2 also sports a large active cooler on the ICH10R Southbridge and NF200 switch incorporated into the board, a couple of additional heatsinks on the dual 8-phase digital PWMs accompanying each CPU socket.
Each socket is accompanied by a bank of six DDR3 DIMM slots, and scattered about the board are a number of additional power connectors. In addition to the 24-pin ATX and dual 8-pin CPU power connectors; there are a trio of supplementary PCI Express 6-pin power connectors like those that would normally be used for graphics cards. These additional connectors are only required when using multi-GPU graphics configurations or for extreme overclocking.
We should also point out that in addition to exploiting all of the features available in the 5520 chipset; the EVGA Classified SR-2 is outfitted with NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controllers, as well. In total, the board has 6 SATA II ports, 2 SATA III ports, and 2 SATA II eSATA ports, and 2 USB 3.0 and 10 USB 2.0 ports. |
| EVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard (Cont.) |
The EVGA Classified SR-2 also ships with a fully-loaded accessory bundle, which includes the company’s ECP V3 (EVGA Control Panel) module.
The accessory bundle includes the obligatory driver CD, which also contains a copy of EVGA’s E-LEET system tweaking utility, a rear case I/O panel, two CPU backplates, six SATA data cables, 3 SATA power adapters, 2-way / 3-way / 4-way SLI bridge connectors, a four-port USB bracket, a case badge, a user’s manual and a quick visual installation guide.
It’s nice to see all these accessories included with the board considering its extreme nature, but the most interesting piece of kit has to be the ECP V3 module. This little module connects to the board via a ribbon cable and array of wiring, and gives users “remote” access to power, reset, and clear CMOS switches, a POST code error reporter, three additional switches to bump up CPU voltages by .1v and maximize fan speeds, and jumpers for disability PCI Express lanes.
The I/O backplane on the EVGA Classified SR-2 sports a single PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, a clear CMOS switch, 2 eSATA ports, dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, six various audio inputs / outputs, and a header for EVGA’s EVBOT remote overclocking accessory. We should point out that the LAN ports come by way of Marvell Yukon controllers and the audio by a Realtek 8-channel HD chip. |
| Intel Xeon X5680: 6 Cores, 12 Threads |
As we’ve mentioned the EVGA Classified SR-2 supports Intel’s Xeon 5500 and 5600 series processors. Upon initial inspection, the Xeon 5500 and 5600 series looks just like their socket 1366-based desktop counterparts, as you can see in the images below...
The top sides of the CPUs are outfitted with the same basic heat-spreader design as every other Socket 1366 processor and the chips use similar packaging.
The Xeon 5600 series processors feature a monolithic die with six execution cores. The queue engine and uncore elements reside in the center of the chip, flanked on either side by three execution cores and 1/2 of the shared L3 cache. The memory controller, miscellaneous I/O and QPI links are situated around the edges. In total, the chip is comprised of roughly 1.17B (that's billion) transistors and has a die size of about 248mm2. |
| G.Skill's 12GB, CAS 6, 6 Channel RAM |
Due to the fact that each Intel Xeon 5500 / 5600 series processor has an integrated memory controller, each chip requires its own pool of RAM. To run at peak performance, a triple-channel configuration is required for each CPU, which means a minimum of six DIMMs is necessary. Thankfully, due to the popularity of Intel’s Core i7 desktop processors, which also require triple-channel memory for max performance, and the proliferation of 64-bit editions of Windows (and other OSes) high-capacity, six-DIMM memory kits are now widely available.
The DIMMs are outfitted with oversized, aluminum heatsinks, and require a voltage of only 1.6v. In addition, G.SKILL includes an active cooler, which can be snapped right down over the memory retention clips. |
| Lian Li PC-V2120b: A Worthy Chassis |
As we mentioned earlier, the EVGA Classified SR-2 sports an HPTX form factor, which is much larger than the ubiquitous ATX form factor of most desktop motherboards. The good thing about this large form factor is that EVGA had a lot of room to work with to keep the layout clean and integrate lots of bells and whistles, but a major downside is that the motherboard simply won’t fit in the vast majority of cases currently on the market.
At this point, the EVGA Classified SR-2 can only be installed (without modifications) in a handful of Mountain Mods cases using an updated motherboard tray, and a couple of Lian Li cases. For the purposes of our build, we reached out to Lian Li and were one of the first to get our hands on a new PC-V2120 prototype, fresh of the show floor at Computex.
The Lian LI PC-V2120 is an ultra-high-quality, all aluminum full tower, designed for enthusiasts or workstation professionals. The case will be offered in three versions, the PC-V2120B, which is black with a brushed aluminum interior, the PC-V2120A, which is all brushed aluminum, and the PC-V2120X, which is black inside and out.
There are positions for 11 expansion slots, 12 drive bays (four external 5.25”), and a separate zone at the bottom of the case for the PSU. There is sound deadening material installed on the side panels and front, and all of the intake fan positions have filters to prevent dust build up. |
| BIOS and Overclocking | ||||
Although the EVGA Classified SR-2 is built around Intel’s 5520 workstation-class chipset, it actually features a BIOS that’s more akin to an enthusiast-class, overclocker-friendly motherboard. This is important to point out because the vast majority of workstation motherboards for Xeon processors do not support any sort of overclocking and usually have minimal options for performance tuning and tweaking.
While the EVGA Classified SR-2 does have an extensive array of voltage and frequency related options, that will surely appease the hardcore overclockers out there, we do think it can use a bit of refinement. The board was stable and we didn’t experience and BIOS-related glitches, but its layout is somewhat mundane and there are minimal explanations as to what each feature does. Savvy users won’t really mind this, but it would still be useful to have at least some explanations listed. At the very least, we would have liked to have seen the default values for each option listed at the right so users could more easily see what the recommended values are for things like IOH and CPU PLL voltages.
Of course, with such a powerful platform at our disposal even in its stock form, we wanted to see how easily it could be pushed and how far it would go with little more than some quality air-coolers and a small voltage bump.
With an additional .15 volts for each processor and the memory set at the processor’s recommended max of 1.65v, we were easily able to hit 4.1GHz with the Xeon 5680s, for an increase of about 800MHz over stock (disregarding Turbo Mode). At this kind of frequency, the platform obviously offers extreme performance, as is evident by the Cinebench 11.5 score shown here, which makes even the Core i7 980X and Skulltrail seem quaint in comparison. |
| Our Test Systems and SANDRA | ||||||||||||
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings manually, enabled AHCI, and disabled any proprietary auto-overclocking features. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled, finally, we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010 SP1, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA suite with the SR-2 and a pair of Intel Xeon 5680s (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 3.33GHz but with Turbo Mode enabled.
The numbers put up in SANDRA by the EVGA Classified SR-2 when paired to a duo of Intel's flagship Xeons are nothing short of spectacular. The dual-Xeon 5680s outpace even a quartet of Opterons in aggregate arithmetic performance, with a score of 258.37 GOPS. Aggregate multi-media performance for the platform exceeded 488MPix/s, and total memory bandwidth was just shy of 36GB/s. |
| PCMark Vantage | ||||
Next up, we ran a number of different test systems through Futuremark’s most recent system performance metric, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Many of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a multi-core CPUs.
Even with HyperThreading disabled, the EVGA Classified SR-2 with dual Intel Xeon 5680 processors put up the best scores overall, decimating the 2P Skulltrail platform and Phenom II X6. The Core i7 980X, however, was right there beside it, for two likely reasons: the 980X has HT enabled here, so it could process 12 threads simultaneously, and Vantage isn't fully capable of exploiting all of the horsepower offered by the EVGA Classified SR-2 when paired to Intel's flagship Xeon 5680 processors and a bevy of fast RAM. |
| 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage | ||||||||
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.
3DMark06 was developed before multi-core desktop systems were prevalent, so it's comes as no surprise that this benchmark cannot exploit the additional resources afforded by the SR-2 / Xeon combo. The SR-2 was the leader by a considerable margin, but the 980X isn't all that far behind.
3DMark Vantage's CPU Test 2 is a multi-threaded test designed for comparing relative game physics processing performance between systems. This test consists of a single scene that features an air race of sorts, with a complex configuration of gates. There are aircraft in the test that trail smoke and collide with various cloth and soft-body obstacles, each other, and the ground. The smoke spreads, and reacts to the planes as they pass through it as well and all of this is calculated on the host CPU.
3DMark Vantage's CPU Test 2 shows a larger spread than 3DMark06, but not what you'd expect from such a monster system. The EVGA Classified SR-2 / Dual Xeon 5680 combo ends up being only about 12% faster than the Core i7 980X in this benchmark, but is considerably faster than any of the other platforms. |
| Cinbench and POV-Ray | ||||||||
Cinebench R11.5 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented by the Cinebench scores in the graph below.
Umm. Wow. Obviously Cinebench has no trouble taxing all of the cores--both logical and physical--available with the SR-2 / Xeon combo. In this test, it nearly doubles the performance of Intel's most powerful desktop processor and leaves everything else in its wake.
POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is a top-notch open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'all-CPU' benchmarking tool on all of our test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
POV-Ray proved to be another strong point for the EVGA Classified SR-2. In this benchmark, like Cinebench above, the SR-2 nearly doubled the performance of the Core i7 980X in the multi-threaded portion of the test and smoked everything else. The single-threaded portion of the benchmark shows what is to be expected--a single core on any Core i7 Nehalem derivative is going to perform similarly, at like clock speeds. |
| Gaming: Crysis, ETQW, HAWX | ||||||||
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
For this next round of game tests, we abandoned the singe GeForce GTX 280 in favor of a pair of GeForce GTX 480s running in SLI mode. We wanted to throw an ultra-powerful pair of graphics card in the system to see how it would behave while gaming at very high resolutions and image quality settings. Here, we compared the EVGA Classified SR-2 / dual Xeon 5680 combo to a Core i7 980X in a couple of graphically intense games.
The high-resolution game tests seem to jibe with our low-res tests above, but for a different reason. When a game is limited by the graphics subsystem, or is 'GPU-bound', peak performance is determined by the graphics card's capabilities. And that's what we're seeing here. |
| Total System Power Consumption | ||||
We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.
With two processor sockets loaded with a pair of Intel's best Xeons and double the number of memory sticks in the system, it should come as no surprise that the EVGA Classfied SR-2 / dual Xeon 5680 combo consumes a good amount of power. The results of our testing, however, aren't as extreme as you may think. While idling, the SR-2 setup consumed only 48 more watts than the Core i7 980X. Under load conditions, consumption jumped significantly though, and the EVGA Classified SR-2 / Dual Xeon 5680 combo used 141 more watts than the 980X. That's a lot of juice, relatively speaking; but we have to say, when paired with the right coolers, heat and noise are non-issues (we used a pair of Thermalright 120s). |
| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The performance of the EVGA Classified SR-2, when powered by a pair of Intel's flagship Xeon 5680 processors, is nothing short of impressive, for the most part. In synthetic tests and multi-threaded benchmarks that can exploit all of the processor resources afforded by the platform, the EVGA Classified SR-2 / dual Xeon 5680 combo put up some excellent numbers, that nearly doubled the performance of the current top-of-the-line Core i7 980X. In applications that can't fully tax the platform, however, much of the power of the EVGA Classified SR-2 / dual Xeon 5680 combo is untapped and performance, while still good, isn't that much better than a powerful desktop PC that's powered by a single CPU.
If there's one thing we really like around here it's high performance. And in the current PC landscape, you can't do much better than a 2P platform designed for Intel's flagship Xeon processors built around the company's premiere chipset. Couple that with the fact that EVGA has pulled out all the stops and equipped the Classified SR-2 with numerous overclocking and performance-tweaking related features, as well as having integrated the latest IO technologies like USB 3.0 and SATA 6G; from a technological standpoint, it's difficult to not be enamored by the the board. The EVGA Classified SR-2 is geek-porn personified.
There are some major drawbacks to such a beast, however. First, the sheer size of the EVGA Classified SR-2 severely limits the number of cases users can choose from. In fact, to date, there are only a handful that can accommodate the board's HPTX form factor, from Mountain Mods and, of course, Lian Li. There are also additional complexities to consider when assembling a dual CPU-powered system and we can't forget about cost. The EVGA Classified SR-2 commands a hefty $599 price. In light of many enthusiast-class desktop motherboards, that's a huge pill to swallow. And it also makes the SR-2 one of the most expensive Intel 5520 based boards on the market. Intel's Xeon processors also of course carry a huge premium over their similarly-clocked desktop counterparts and you'll need six memory stick to wring the most performance from the platform. If you want to play in the 2P space, you'll definitely have to pay--value be damned.
With that said, as small as the niche may be, we know there are those willing to drop big coin to build an ultra-powerful system like the one we tested; take a quick gander at EVGA's forum and you'll see a number of users showing off their SR-2 based rigs and benchmark scores. If you're one of the lucky few that have the means to assembled such a beast, or if you're a workstation professional type that simply must have copious amounts of processing bandwidth, the EVGA Classified SR-2 is simply an awesome product. There are no other 5520-chipset based motherboards currently available (that we can find, at least) that offer the kind of features and flexibility that the SR-2 does. This board is rock-solid stable in its default configuration and offers extensive performance tuning capabilities that would please even the most hard-core overclockers and performance enthusiasts. It's obviously not the best value out there, but in terms of performance, features, and wow-factor, it doesn't get much better than this.
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