Supermicro makes X38 workstation board

Supermicro might not be the first brand you think about when it comes to buying a new motherboard, but the company has an extensive range of workstation and server boards. The company is as far as we know the second manufacturer to have a workstation board based on the X38 chipset, the first one being Asus.

The C2SBX, as Supermicro calls it's X38 board, features two x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots, one x1 slot, two standard PCI slots and finally a pair of 64-bit PCI-X slots. This should appeal to those looking at getting a relatively low cost workstation system with a quad core CPU.

With the support for ECC memory in the X38 chipset, it's not strange to see companies such as Supermicro creating motherboards based around it. The C2SBX supports up toe 8GB of DDR3 memory at speed of up to 1,333MHz. Other features include six SATA ports, six rear USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire ports via a bracket, Intel Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio, as well as what can only be described as retro features these days, a parallel and serial port.

The reason for the parallel and serial port would be for usage with high-end software products such as CAD/CAM packages which comes with a dongle that attaches to either of these ports. Apart from this there isn't much that stands out about this board, no fancy heat pipe cooling or overclocking features. This is a board that's meant for serious work and not play.

You can find the C2SBX product page here and you can also find a tiny picture of the board there.