EVGA's Classified SR-X Motherboard Hits the Market

[Cypherdude]

Nice to see EVGA replaced the Marvell NIC to Intel. The older SR-2 would kill the Marvell NIC when some serious overclock is applied. However their storage choice is horrible. While having 1 or 2 SATA 3Gbps ports is just fine for any optical drive the typical customer of such highly priced board expects nothing but cutting-edge components. A single LSI SAS controller would have improved performance, reliability and the layout of the board as there would be fewer connectors.

EVGA's Classified SR-X Motherboard, which is not being sold yet, has 2 mini-SAS to 4 SATA connections. However, there's nothing in the specs in the 270-SE-W888.pdf file which state the SAS to SATA are 6 GB's. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious, but I am not convinced they are actually 6GB. BTW, the eSATA 6 GB controller is from the dreaded Marvell. I think this means the eSATA will be limited to a x1 PCIe connection. Furthermore, Marvell does little to nothing to support end-users with firmware and driver updates. Some of the EVGA mobo reviewers on Newegg say they're having problems with the BIOS.

I don't know what EVGA does for after purchase support for firmware and drivers for the third party controllers on their mobo's but Asus does NOTHING. I have not been able to find any firmware and driver updates for any of my third party controllers on Asus's website. I have found no updates at all for my P7P55D-E Pro mobo, which was supposed to be top-of-the-line in March of last year. My P7P55D-E Pro has a Marvell SE9123 controller for SATA drives, a JMicron JMB363 PATA and eSATA controller, and an NEC (now Renesas) USB 3.0 controller. I particularly need updates for the Renesas. I'm left to guess whether firmware and drivers from www.station-drivers.com will work and I don't really want to do that. Plus, www.station-drivers.com is a French site so I can't even understand half what they write or whether the drivers are in English or French.

The marketing hype for all these computer products always exceeds reality. There's always some kind of problem you have to deal with. For example, my Asus has an intermittent stalling problem which causes frame dropping while playing video. I just had an "APC_INDEX_MISMATCH" BSOD because my eSATA connected HDD woke up too long after the system woke from sleep. While Asus claims on their website that their mobo will support 4x4GB RAM sticks, I discovered in their manual that it only supports 2 Intel XMP spec'd RAM sticks. Sometimes my Renesas USB 3.0 controller also gives me problems.

EVGA's Classified SR-X is a $688 board. However, I highly doubt it will be without problems because there's always something you have to deal with.

 

[arzbhatia]

WOW! 😱