Intel V8 versus AMD 4X4 Platform :: Intel S5000Xvx Motherboard

Box Shot

Currently this is the only board in the Workstation class from the folks at Intel and it has many features that make it a very good product for the at-home professional who needs more than desktop system performance in an affordable price range. The board supports an amazing 32GB of memory, which is enough memory for even the most demanding rendering scenes and even with the 4GB that we tested the board with it performed great in 3D applications. RAID is available in Modes 1-10, but not in Windows Vista for some reason where only RAID 1 and RAID 0 Arrays are detected. The board is also very large and finding an enclosure to fit it can become a major pain as it fits very few cases on the retail market.

It also has a lot of different cable connections that make installation in anything other than its designed enclosure from Intel a rather daunting affair. Supporting the latest 5000 class of Xeon CPUs, the S5000Xvx has dual LAN ports, Realtek 2-channel basic audio and can support up to six internal SATA devices by RAID and two by SAS. There is only a single VGA slot of the PCIe variety so no SLI or CrossFire support is to be found here. Having dual 64-Bit PCI slots allows the use of the most modern SCSI cards if you want to build a server or workstation having very fast transfer rates of up to 10,000 RPM using the latest Seagate Ultra320 Drives. If you want to use the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) device; you can get transfer rates of up to 15,000 RPMs. This is the fastest transfer rate available on the open market today.

Side Shot

Angle Board

Memory

Dual Xeon 5160

PCI-64 Bit

Board Connect

Rear I/O

SATA

Power