Open the box you find the manual, Installation and software CD, 3x Sata cables, 1x floppy and 1xIDE as well as the backplate for the case.. also supplied is the complete mounting kit you will need for setting up motherboard and coolers.

Everything was in excellent condition and I could find no faults, What we are interested in though is what is underneath.

Now that’s a first for my eyes anyway…. By that I mean this is the first motherboard I have ever opened the box to find foam on the top as well as the underneath, but when you consider the price of this board its only right it should be extra protected. Let’s take the motherboard out of the box and take a closer look.

The First thing you notice when taking the mobo out of the box is the dual Xeon and dual SLi slots and the not so cheap capacitors. Taking a look around the board we can see what to expect.

As you can see the SLi is controlled via the bios and is quite a unique feature on a dual Xeon board. Go ahead do a Google search and find an SLi dual Xeon board. Its not something you see every day.

The board has 2 x ATA-100 and 4 Serial ATA ports supported by Silicon Image with RAID 0, 1, 10. 2x Serial ATA ports supported by 6300ESB with RAID 0, 1 Support Adaptec, Host RAID, Support hot swap so it pretty much covers most setups.

The motherboard supports memory in the ECC flavour and can take a massive 8 gigs of DDR2, now why this is very impressive it would also be very expensive and I have to say we wont be testing this motherboard with that amount instead we will be using a simple 1 gig kit of ECC DDR2. Let me tell you it wasn’t easy to source and get. The EZ525 chipset is rumored to work excellent and pared with 2xXeons should run excellently across the board in tests. The only problem you will have is deciding which Xeon to get and that will matter on price.

The IO section of the board has 4xUSB, normal PS2 connectors, Parallel, LAN, firewire and com port ports on the rear. On the sound side of things there is 3 audio out connectors. These are for the 6 channel sound which means Dolby 5.1 is in order to provide feature rich sound although not up to today’s 7.1 standards there are not many running a 7.1 set out there.

So what do we have?  Well first I would have to say we have a high performance dual Xeon based motherboard that really is aimed at the 3D creation market. But on the other hand we could have and enthusiasts gaming rig as well ( a very expensive one), don’t think so, well Alienware uses this board in one of there ALX branded machines and there has to be a reason for that. So let’s get it installed and put it through its paces and find out shall we.

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