Supermicro X11SAE Workstation Motherboard Review

Bohs Hansen / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts & Pricing

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Supermicro X11SAE can be yours for just $280.99 at NewEgg, £214.28 at LambdaTek, or €233.26 through Geizhals.

Overview

Supermicro created a basic ATX form factor motherboard with their X11SAE, yet it isn’t one that you should move past without checking out. It is packed with the latest technologies all around which allows you to take full advantage of all your components. The board is mainly intended for use with Xeon E3-1200 V5 processors, but it will work equally well with normal consumer Skylake CPUs such as the Core, Celeron, and Pentium series. With support for up to 64GB memory you should have plenty for even the largest tasks, may you work with audio, video, CAD, or something completely different.

There is plenty of storage capabilities from modern PCI-based M.2 slot over to the eight legacy SATA3 ports where two of them also work as SuperDOM ports. The two onboard LAN ports are both from Intel and as with the rest of the parts, there is plenty of software and driver support for these parts. That’s great to see as it allows the end-user to truly pick the operating system that he wants to use. It further has onboard sound card that performs very well and is equally well supported. Supermicro even made sure that the use of legacy PCI devices is as easy as possible with the two of these slots.

As this is the first test with the Greenlow based motherboards, we don’t have that big of a comparison in that regard yet. But when we compare it to other workstation motherboards that we have tested in the past, we see a motherboard that presents itself strongly. We saw how it performed great in both memory and CPU intensive tasks as well as a good audio and network performance. We will naturally also update this part as we get more motherboards tested to get a real comparison.

The only downside to this motherboard isn’t really a downside, but something worth mentioning again. It has no iGPU unless the CPU you will be using has one. It already has all the relevant ports for it, so it’s down to the user what to choose. Most people with a board like this will utilize a Quadro or FirePro graphics card anyway, which would make an onboard solution unnecessary.

Pros:

Competitive price for the features
Great performance
Next-Gen USB 3.1 and M.2 PCIe connectors
Legacy support
Easy BIOS recovery

Cons:

None

“A great performance and a full set of modern features such as M.2 PCI and USB 3.1 make the Supermicro X11SAE a great choice that also comes with a good legacy hardware and driver support.”