EVGA Classified Super Record 2 SR-2 Motherboard Review

The EVGA Classified SR-2

Did someone say big? This motherboard is huge; its an HPTX sized motherboard, and it dwarfs even server motherboards in the EATX form factor. Here we have an ATX motherboard on top of it for comparison. Officially its 13.6 inches long (345.4mm) and 15 inches wide (381mm). The reason for the size is not because of the dual CPU sockets, but for the SEVEN PCIe slots! Well get more into the issue of size in just a bit.

The seven 16x PCIe 2.0 slots are powered by a mixture of the Intel 5520 chipset and a pair of NF200 PCIe controllers. In one configuration, populating the bottom slot gives it 16 lanes with the others getting just 8 lanes each. In the other configuration slots 1, 3, 5, and 7 each get 16 lanes. Add it up and its enough for either 4-way SLI or CrossFireX, perfect for breaking world records.

If you need a lot of RAM the EVGA Classified SR-2 has got you covered. Touting 12 RAM slots, you can have up to 48GB of memory!

Outside of the dual sockets and seven PCIe slots, the EVGA Classified SR-2 is similar to most recent high end X58 chipset motherboards. Above we see the eight SATA ports, six of these are SATA II 3GB/s and two are SATA III 6GB/s.

Another now standard feature for the second generation X58 boards is USB 3.0. On the back panel there are two USB 3.0 available ports. With a total of 10 USB 2.0 ports supported, six of which are on the back panel, you should have plenty of connectivity.

Also on the back panel you can see that there is a single PS2 port, CMOS reset button, two ESATA ports, two Marvell Gigabit NICs, and 8 channel HD analog audio connectors. The small black connector is for the bundled EVBot, which we will get to on the next page.

Here you can see on board power and reset buttons, as well as a second clear CMOS button. These are handy for testing the system outside of a case. Its just below the last PCIe slot, which isnt the most ideal location if you are testing the system in 4-way SLI/CrossFireX since a double slot card would end up covering them.

Obviously, powering this much high end hardware takes a lot of power. The SR-2 has an EPS 8-pin connector for each CPU, with an optional 6-pin PCIe connector for those who plan to really crank up the overclock and plan on using liquid nitrogen.

Here you can see the On-board diagnostics LED readout which also displays the socket temperature of CPU 0 once the system has loaded an operating system.

Lets take a look at the Box and Bundle before we move on to the BIOS.