14 DAY TRIAL // Even though consumer-oriented six-core CPUs and DirectX 11 graphics cards are what end-users probably think most about right now, there are certain things that cannot go by unnoticed. Such is the case with EVGA's Classified SR-2 motherboard. Announced back in March, just after Intel officially introduced its Xeon 5600 Series of processors, the motherboard failed to ravage the enthusiast market for the sole reason that it wasn't available yet. This will soon change.
The Classified SR-2 has finally been listed on the company's website and will supposedly start shipping on June 2. This means hardcore speed enthusiasts need only wait for another week. In the meantime, they can save up the $599.99 that will be required in order to make the purchase, unless they are in a hurry, in which case they can simply go and make a pre-order.
Those who have forgotten what makes EVGA's creature appealing may like to know that, for one, it is a two-headed beast. To be specific, it has not one, but two LGA 1366 sockets, which means that two Intel Xeon 5500 or Xeon 5600 central processing units can be used with it. Of course, in such a situation, said processors will hardly be central anymore, but they won't fight for dominance because they will have 12 DDR3 memory slots and seven PCI Express x16 slots to keep them occupied. Two NVIDIA NF200 bridge chips are used to manage this number of graphics slots, along with the 2-way, 3-way or Quad-SLI or CrossFireX configurations that they allow.
Other specifications that make this board a true overclocker's quarry include Clear CMOS, Power and Reset buttons, support for the EVBot handheld OC device and jumpers of disabling PCI-E slots. As for connectivity and I/O, the board's maker threw in dual Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, eSATA and USB 3.0 ports (two for each), six SATA 6.0 Gbps and six SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors.