Super Micro C2SBX+

BIOS:

Super Micro uses a Phoenix cME FirstBIOS Pro BIOS on the C2SBX+ motherboard. Within the BIOS you'll find the standard settings one would expect for a workstation motherboard. The hardware monitoring area reads the CPU and system temperature, all five fan speeds, fan speed control modes, and voltages for the CPU, 12V rail, DDR3 memory, 5V rail, and 3.3V rail.

System Setup:

With Super Micro's focus on the workstation and server markets, they do support Linux on a number of their different motherboards. Among the Linux distributions they support on different products include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SuSE, and Fedora. We have already used the Intel X48 Chipset on Linux (in fact, even before the chipset officially made its debut) so we were not surprised when the Super Micro C2SBX+ had worked flawlessly with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. In addition to the core functionality of this motherboard working flawlessly with this Linux 2.6.24 kernel distribution -- even the LM_Sensors support was first-rate. All of the voltage sensors were properly detected, sensors for all five of the fan connectors, and the two temperature sensors. All values reported were accurate too. For this support we were using the LM_Sensors w83627dhg-isa-0290 module.

The hardware we used with this test setup was an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, Seagate 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX 512MB, and SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF power supply. With the NVIDIA 9800GTX graphics card we were using the NVIDIA 173.14.09 display driver. We had compared the performance of this motherboard to the X38-based ASUS P5E3 Premium and X48-based Gigabyte X48T-DQ6.

For benchmarking this motherboard on Linux we had used the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.2 with the pcqs-motherboard suite, which consists of the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Demo, Nexuiz, OpenArena, X-Plane, timed PHP compilation, timed Apache compilation, timed Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG encryption, IOzone write performance, OpenSSL RSA encryption, RAMspeed, and Sunflow Rendering System. The results can be found on the following pages. If you wish to benchmark your motherboard against the Super Micro C2SBX+ on Linux, run phoronix-test-suite benchmark michael-31398-11817-7344 (PTS Global entry).