Very odd this.
Whilst I can see the advantages of being able to run two Xeons on the same board (for sheer core count alone) the fact that the new Xeons are un-clockable makes this a strange idea.
To make it worthwhile you would need to buy two Xeons with huge core counts which immediately starts to get very expensive, then you realise that new Xeons are really just the same Sandybridge/Ivybridge CPUs as their desktop counterparts in slightly different flavours (IE - The E3 1220 has the same core count as the I5 2500 but the L3 cache of the I7 2600 with ECC support) .
But the fact remains that other than different cache levels and core counts they are just Sandy/Ivy CPUs underneath it all.
Which begs the question (to me at least) why EVGA have bothered with the Xeons this time around given that you can't clock them, at all
Surely it would have been a better idea to make a board that can support multiple
insert regular old chip model here on the same board and have the ability to clock them
I remember at the end of the 90s and into the early noughties several budget type boards that could take multiple CPUs (two usually was the norm). The difference, though, was that these boards could take anything that would fit. At that time it was a choice of Celerons or Coppermine flip chip P3s. You could then up the bus clocks and gain slight overclocks out of them which all made sense if you used Windows 2000.
Abit were the kings of it, and the price was good too, about £140 IIRC.
Not only that but you could use bog standard SDRAM modules too, with no need for ECC support. So I guess that's what I am finding hard to figure out here. Why didn't EVGA design a board that you could throw two 2500ks (for example) onto and then clock them?
And the price? well it's ridiculous. P77 or whatever they are called (and P67 etc) boards don't cost that much. Not like a 2011 or the 1366 before it.
So the only thing this board has going for it is the ability to run a pair of (example) £1500 processors for sheer core count.
Which kind of rules out the enthusiast as there's no gains to be had, and no special techniques to set any records with. All you need is a huge bank balance and a large dose of stupidity.
Which makes it all a bit pointless really. Even more pointless that companies like Supermicro make boards just like this one for around the same price.