Supermicro X7DVL-E Motherboard - Dual Intel 64-BIT Xeon Support (667/1066/1333MHZ Fsb), 16GB DDR2 667 & 5

The product is exactly has it was described and arrived in a very timely fashion. An exact match for the board in my server that started a slow death after 6 years of continuous use.

The board arrived in a timely manner. The BIOS chip was different .so we could not recover smoothly at all. It would not recognize the drives or the raid. We took the old BIOS chip out and put it in the new board and at least we can use the dual processors and drives although we will still have to data entry all licensing and other pertinent info that would have otherwise just loaded up.Very disappointed in this product.

Worked perfectly as a replacement motherboard.

I built a desktop PC workstation out of an old DC (domain controller) server that had this motherboard in it. My experience to date with this type of hardware had been exclusively in servers, so it was nice to be able to offer a subjective review of this in both capacities. I can honestly say that I am impressed. The X7DVL-E is a full-size ATX (12x10") motherboard designed as a middle-of-the-road server/workstation board, and it fits there almost perfectly.It has an impressive feature set to it, including just about every type of expansion and I/O slot you could ask for. This is a dual-CPU design featuring Intel LGA771 sockets that will handle the dual and quad core Xeon CPU's, ranging from the 5000, 5100, 5200 dual core, to the 5300 and 5400 quad-cores in 667, 1066, and 1333 MHz bus speeds, handling a max of 3.4 GHz with the dual cores and 3.16 GHz with the quad-core CPU's. Basically, this will run both the early NetBurst Pentium D/Extreme-based Dempsey, Clarksdale, and Woodcrest 5000-5200 Xeons, and the Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad/Extreme Harpertown and Clovertown 5300-5400's. The fastest CPU this will run is the X5460 at 3.16 GHz, 1333 FSB. It supports both 64 and 32 bit system and devices, and is ready with Intel's VT-x virtualization technology.The motherboard runs on the Intel Blackford 5000V chipset (northbridge) and the Intel ESB2 (Enterprise Southbridge 2) storage controller, so it supports SATA 3 GB/s, RAID0, 1, 5, and 10. For I/O there's 6 SATA 3 GB/s port to support 6 SATA hard drives, dual Intel 82563EB "Gilgal" gigabit LAN ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, 2 USB 2.0 ports in back and on-board 4 headers, a Fast 16550 serial port and header, ECP/EEP parallel header, D-Sub VGA out, and 6 expansion slots. The board features the latest (for the time) IPMI functionality with a 200-pin SIM1U slot. There are 2 32-bit PCI 33 MHz slots, a PCI-e 4x and 8x slot, and 2 32/64-bit PCI-X 100/133 MHz slots. Of course, you do get a single-channel EIDE UDMA/100 IDE storage controller that supports up to 2 devices like a hard drive or optical drive, and there's a 1.44/2.88 MB floppy drive port. Basically you get every kind of port and connectivity needed to run a nice server or workstation. There is even a graphics chip, the ATi ES1000 with 16 MB of video RAM. It's not for gaming or doing CAD, but it will do things like Netflix or other similar things just fine and is perfectly adequate for a workstation. There is however, no sound card or output (this is designed for a server, not really for multimedia) so if you want to have sound, you'd need a PCI sound card, which are cheap and easy to find.There are a ton of utilities and "watchdog" functions on this board and in the BIOS for you to configure. The BIOS is Phoenix's 8 MB flash EEPROM, which lets you chose your own parameters for a lot of the diagnostic and HW monitoring functions. There's even a feature that lets you adjust the CPU's clock multiplier for overclocking if you wanted to. The board has 6 4-pin fan headers that support PWM for auto fan speed throttling based on hardware temperatures. You can also adjust the fan speeds to optimize them for a server or workstation application. For the RAM there is 6 DIMM slots. It takes 240-pin 667 MHz PC2-5300 fully-buffered error correcting RAM modules only...you can't use desktop or non-ECC/FB ram in this motherboard as it won't fit and the chipset doesn't support it. You can populate the slots with 512 MB, 1, 2, or 4 GB DIMM's for a total of 24 GB. RAM for this application is actually cheap...8 GB of used RAM is around $50.I configured this board with 2 Intel 5030 Dempsey Xeons (2.66 GHz dual core hyper threading 667 FSB), 1 GB RAM, a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA II HDD, an Antec 650 W power supply, 2 Intel (Sanyo) CPU fans, 2 chassis fans, and a plain-jane CD-RW drive with Win. XP Pro. It was great. Never had a problem with it! Even with the low-end CPU's, it as still fast and had a ton of processing power. With more RAM it would have been very fast. I compared this to a modern Core i5 2400 machine with 4 GB RAM in just about everything I did with it (I'm an IT tech so I work with lots of computers). The ATi graphics chip is perfectly adequate for everything but games and things like CAD. Netflix ran great and so did YouTube videos and Flash-rich apps. It did run a bit warm, which is why you'll need a case with good cooling. The fans I used were not that noisy at all on workstation-mode running at 2100 RPM's. On server mode that was something else, having 2 powerful fans running at 5100 RPM's each is loud. Not for a server, but for a workstation it's obnoxious.You could build yourself a really nice server for cheap as well with this. It will support 6 SATA II hard drives in RAID0, 1, 5, or 10, and with the PCI slots you can add FCP, SAS, SCSi, or other storage/networking add-on's to make it a nice DC, AD controller, Web Server, or File-Server. It's built to last as well. I inherited this from an old DC that had retired from constant 24/7 work for almost 7 years and it shows no signs of wear or any age-related gremlins. The drivers are easy to find and install.Supermicro did a great job in bringing a low-cost but feature packed server/workstation motherboard to the table. It's 6 years old today, but still works like new and has most of the stuff you see on new motherboards for servers. The only thing it's missing is a PCI Express 2 16x slot for a graphics card. It has a PCI slot, but PCI graphics cards are becoming rare and expensive, so you'll be stuck with 16 MB graphics unless you get a PCI graphics card. It has plenty of expansion for any job or application as well. This is an excellent board and I highly recommend it.