Most expensive Motherboard I've ever seen. Hilarious. Especially considering Threadripper is crushing Intel ATM in the market that this board is marketed towards. EVGA needs to take a step back in my opinion, if they want us to take this board seriously. This is just some serious LOL atm.
 

Can you discuss AMD vs Intel elsewhere please?

Well the product clearly isn’t for you. Obviously this platform is a niche and from economical point of view there are cheaper options (which is good).

Comparing with other two motherboards this one is clearly rather cool, kudos for the waterblock.

Lets hope there will be reviews soon.

I am wondering at this point if Intel is paying "rebates" to EVGA for not making any TR40X or X570 boards, they are the only board partner to yet produce a single board for EITHER of those 2 platforms?

As for the board, $1800 for a board is really stretching it even for the exotic high end consumers, and most of them are looking for performance where the best chip this board will get gets STOMPED HARDCORE. The waterblock is a nice touch, but the only people I can see even buying this board will use exotic cooling solutions like LN2 to get max clocks, it's a cool board with a cult following, but it's dead on arrival sadly :(

vinhus
I hope its raid config will work with third-party high-end NVme SSD such as Samsung... and if it does not support then waist the money!

failbadon

vinhus

failbadon

vinhus
I hope its raid config will work with third-party high-end NVme SSD such as Samsung... and if it does not support then waist the money!

you'd spend money on something like this and not buy a dedicated hardware raid card?

Im not a rich man to spend $1700 for this and other raid hardware couple hundred bucks ?! sorry i can't compete with you Mrmillionaire 

if you've got 2k for a board for this (average) and the 3k for the CPU (average) factor in u.2 real SSDs and a good bit of RAM the RAID card is not an issue.  And onboard RAID blows anyways.  Always has, always will.   Ditto that nobody who will "game" on a board like this is going to use the onboard audio, it's well past the price point where soundcards or external DACs come into play.
 
If anybody is going to be sane and actually "use" this platform rather than brag here's what you want , won't OC but  you shouldn't OC it but has LRIMM support.
 
And hardware raid cards are less than a 2080ti, let a lone a titan, it's not that bad for expense.

If you are talking about NVMe Raid it will be pointless if this board is "PCIe 3.0" I ran 2 Samsung Evo Plus' in RAID 0 and the result was actually worse then 1. 
As far as other types of raid for other uses IDK. So there will be no performance gain on PCIe 3.0, 4.0 may have better results, but there are now PCIe NVMe that are much faster.
 
Now for RAID using Mechanical drives that's a different story, I have been running HDDs in RAID 0 Since Nvidia 780i (Still Have it) years ago, and I am running RAID 0 x 5 in this PC for almost 5 years. Onboard RAID is not trash, and works great, One of the things I really love about Intel HEDT boards, is the onboard RAID is Great! Easy to setup properly in BIOS/UEFI, and never fails on me. It makes for excellent game drives with large capacity, and performance. However I don't think I would buy this board cause I don't want to spend this kind of money, I would if I had cash to blow.
 

 

bill1024
For playing games, why would anyone buy this at this price when an i7-8086k or i9-xxxxx 8 core will play any game thrown at them.

Owning the best hardware is awesome, bragging rights, & higher benchmark scores. If you're also buying at this level you'll also be playing at 4k where cpu doesn't matter as much.

If you're buying at this level you could most likely buy them too.

I have always loved building high end computers great hobby but for 10k to 12k it's gonna have to spin like burn the tires off spin lol
 

Thank you for posting the SR-3 Dark manual. I’ve already printed it and bound it. I’m about half way thru my initial review.

Lots of choices to make... lots of planning while Intel can get some unlocked Xeons out into the market!

Thank again!
-Arnold

Seems the only ideal usage would be a remote AutoCAD workstation for a quad Quadro P6000 config with a high end Xeon and the 192GB memory...  That or other very, very high demanding Quadro usage...

I suppose it could be used for scientific applications with a quad Tesla or Quadro config.  Its not dual CPU though, which is a issue to an extent for a few reasons...

I can't necessarily explain where this fits into the consumer market except two places...   
1) Maybe bitcoin mining (seems a like a high pricepoint though). 
2) It is Xeon, so it would be ideal for other 24/365 usage.  Intel Core is not intended for 24/365 uptime.  There may be a few consumer applications for this.
I wouldn't necessarily consider it a consumer gaming board, unless you wanted to game on the best of Intel.

The U.2 port on the motherboard is very, very nice for enterprise usage...  Usually you have to buy a PCIe card adapter and waste a PCI slot.  I've only ever seen one consumer buy U.2, because 'its better'...  Better in latency and reliability, but not speed (like 2million hour MTBF).  So maybe there is a consumer market for it.

The waterblock and lack of dual CPU support may deter some workstation/server usage though...

At the end of the day its more enterprise technology.  Its not really intended for consumer.  Its not necessarily wrong to lead consumers into it...  But a consumer probably isn't going to get full usage out of it.  However, if they have the money to throw down it is better in performance and more reliable than consumer technology.

MasterMiner

bsmegreg
Seems the only ideal usage would be a remote AutoCAD workstation for a quad Quadro P6000 config with a high end Xeon and the 192GB memory...  That or other very, very high demanding Quadro usage...

I suppose it could be used for scientific applications with a quad Tesla or Quadro config.  Its not dual CPU though, which is a issue to an extent for a few reasons...

I can't necessarily explain where this fits into the consumer market except two places...   
1) Maybe bitcoin mining (seems a like a high pricepoint though). 
2) It is Xeon, so it would be ideal for other 24/365 usage.  Intel Core is not intended for 24/365 uptime.  There may be a few consumer applications for this.
I wouldn't necessarily consider it a consumer gaming board, unless you wanted to game on the best of Intel.

The U.2 port on the motherboard is very, very nice for enterprise usage...  Usually you have to buy a PCIe card adapter and waste a PCI slot.  I've only ever seen one consumer buy U.2, because 'its better'...  Better in latency and reliability, but not speed (like 2million hour MTBF).  So maybe there is a consumer market for it.

The waterblock and lack of dual CPU support may deter some workstation/server usage though...

At the end of the day its more enterprise technology.  Its not really intended for consumer.  Its not necessarily wrong to lead consumers into it...  But a consumer probably isn't going to get full usage out of it.  However, if they have the money to throw down it is better in performance and more reliable than consumer technology.

Yeah, very pricey for an enthusiast board - way off the charts for gaming. But the build / durability surpasses Supermicro hands down.

Like a lot of these super-high end boards, it’s tailor made for Wall Street quants. It checks every box to the nth degree. It would be almost sad to see this board in a server box quietly feasting on data, but from a cost perspective - that’s where it should be.

As far as single vs double xeon - a modern data crunching machine is going to be hybrid with the gpu’s doing the heavy lifting - a mid-range GeForce card will rip any cpu to shreds, even the priciest xeon, on any deep-learning benchmark - or any mathematical calculations really.

Not all data crunching can be ported over to GPUs. There are tons of math programs that are CPU only LLR,PPS, GFN can be both.
Many other scientific data is still CPU only, even folding st home still has CPU only tasks that can not be ported over to GPU.
I have dual and  quad processor systems with no GPUs (headless) crunching data on CPU only projects, like world community grid and so on.
Everyone has a different use for a computer, and I am sure this system will be a joy to own.
 

bill1024

MasterMiner

bsmegreg
Seems the only ideal usage would be a remote AutoCAD workstation for a quad Quadro P6000 config with a high end Xeon and the 192GB memory...  That or other very, very high demanding Quadro usage...

I suppose it could be used for scientific applications with a quad Tesla or Quadro config.  Its not dual CPU though, which is a issue to an extent for a few reasons...

I can't necessarily explain where this fits into the consumer market except two places...   
1) Maybe bitcoin mining (seems a like a high pricepoint though). 
2) It is Xeon, so it would be ideal for other 24/365 usage.  Intel Core is not intended for 24/365 uptime.  There may be a few consumer applications for this.
I wouldn't necessarily consider it a consumer gaming board, unless you wanted to game on the best of Intel.

The U.2 port on the motherboard is very, very nice for enterprise usage...  Usually you have to buy a PCIe card adapter and waste a PCI slot.  I've only ever seen one consumer buy U.2, because 'its better'...  Better in latency and reliability, but not speed (like 2million hour MTBF).  So maybe there is a consumer market for it.

The waterblock and lack of dual CPU support may deter some workstation/server usage though...

At the end of the day its more enterprise technology.  Its not really intended for consumer.  Its not necessarily wrong to lead consumers into it...  But a consumer probably isn't going to get full usage out of it.  However, if they have the money to throw down it is better in performance and more reliable than consumer technology.

Yeah, very pricey for an enthusiast board - way off the charts for gaming. But the build / durability surpasses Supermicro hands down.

Like a lot of these super-high end boards, it’s tailor made for Wall Street quants. It checks every box to the nth degree. It would be almost sad to see this board in a server box quietly feasting on data, but from a cost perspective - that’s where it should be.

As far as single vs double xeon - a modern data crunching machine is going to be hybrid with the gpu’s doing the heavy lifting - a mid-range GeForce card will rip any cpu to shreds, even the priciest xeon, on any deep-learning benchmark - or any mathematical calculations really.

Not all data crunching can be ported over to GPUs. There are tons of math programs that are CPU only LLR,PPS, GFN can be both.
Many other scientific data is still CPU only, even folding st home still has CPU only tasks that can not be ported over to GPU.
I have dual and  quad processor systems with no GPUs (headless) crunching data on CPU only projects, like world community grid and so on.
Everyone has a different use for a computer, and I am sure this system will be a joy to own.
 

Simply not true. Whether its regression or network optimization CUDA destroys CPU. Have you ever had a gander at Intel’s freely available instruction set for x86/64 processors? About 1300 pages of densely described interrupts, system control, ip, etc, etc, etc...

Every single CPU core must accommodate all of it. Every instruction in the set.

CUDA only does math... with thousands of cores. It’s instruction set is 30 pages. And yes - math is math. Deep learning is one massively global minima effort using gradient descent. That covers the gamut of matrix algebra and every associated axiom known to man.

This goes right back to why 2 xeon’s - at least for this machine / board - is overkill.

If you get near 1 TB of dram - then CPU housekeeping becomes a bigger burden. But for max 192 gb - 1 xeon is plenty.

A beautiful board for a very niche market.

I could reiterate that this board would also work with any usual Xeon *1** Skylake-SP series and *2** CascadeLake-SP series CPUs that fit 3647 and support maximum memory those CPUs can do, so it's not only limited to 32GB UDIMMs, but also can operate much larger RDIMMs ;). No NVDIMM support as that's only 2P systems stuff.  And when using CPU w/o OC, watercooling on the block is not a requirement.

rohini85
Has anyone received a board and able to successfully boot. My config is SR-3 Dark Motherboard, Intel W3175X CPU, and Noctua nh-u14s-dx-3647 cooling, Power supply is EVGA 1600Watt.  I get an error E2 upon hitting the reset button on the board. No signs of any life, upon hitting power button on the board just a click sound, no fan movement no nothing. 
 
I have tried alternate power supply as well. 

Try removing your gpu, and then try starting the pc.

rohini85
Has anyone received a board and able to successfully boot. My config is SR-3 Dark Motherboard, Intel W3175X CPU, and Noctua nh-u14s-dx-3647 cooling, Power supply is EVGA 1600Watt.  I get an error E2 upon hitting the reset button on the board. No signs of any life, upon hitting power button on the board just a click sound, no fan movement no nothing. 
 
I have tried alternate power supply as well. 

Mine works just fine. Booted first attempt. Did you torque the screws correctly and in the correct order? You should use a torque driver for install.