EVGA SR3 (Super Record 3) Cometh

It's been on the backdrops at this year's Computex event, where close to every motherboard maker showed off its LGA2011 wares. It had been written off after rumors spread of attrition among some of its "key" designers. Today EVGA has risen like a phoenix from the ashes. Its latest disclosure, of the EVGA Super Record 3 (SR3)  is more of a statement than anything, that EVGA is still very much the king of ultra-high end motherboards.


It's been on the backdrops at this year's Computex event, where close to every motherboard maker showed off its LGA2011 wares. It had been written off after rumors spread of attrition among some of its "key" designers. Today EVGA has risen like a phoenix from the ashes. Its latest disclosure, of the EVGA Super Record 3 (SR3)  is more of a statement than anything, that EVGA is still very much the king of ultra-high end motherboards.

The SR3, going with tradition, is a 2P high-end desktop/workstation motherboard in the E-ATX form-factor. It features two LGA2011 sockets, which can hold 2P-capable Xeon processors in the LGA2011 package, though we have to wait and see if at least the top-end Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" chips turn out to be 2P-capable. Socket 0 is wired to eight DDR3 DIMM slots (two per channel), while socket 1 has four (one per channel). This shows that the two sockets can be asymmetrically populated with DIMMs, like 2P LGA1366 systems.
There are two BGA chips, at least one of them is a platform controller hub (PCH). There are seven PCI-Express x16 slots, out of which, four are PCI-Express 3.0 x16 capable, every slot is PCI-Express 3.0 x8 capable. Of course, 4-way NVIDIA SLI is supported. In terms of storage connectivity, there are, according to EVGA, 14 SATA ports. Other connectivity includes 8+2 channel HD audio, two GbE connections, USB 3.0, eSATA, Bluetooth, and EVBot connections.
Moving on to things that actually make this an enthusiast product, umm...where do we start? Each CPU socket is powered by a 6+1 phase digital PWM power supply driven by CPL inductors, and Volterra PWM circuitry. The memory in turn is powered by 8-phase digital PWM circuitry. Apart from the 24-pin ATX connector, power is drawn in by two 8-pin EPS, and three 6-pin PCIe connectors, so you can imagine power delivery to be robust. There is every EVGA-exclusive feature you can imagine, starting from DIP switches that let you toggle PCI-Express slots and SATA ports, consolidated voltage measurement points, EVBot support (the module could even come bundled), full POSCAP design, and a UEFI firmware with every option a record-seeking overclocker could possibly tinker with.