Supermicro X7DAE Intel 5000X LGA771 DDR2 E-ATX motherboard

Dual-socket Xeon workstation board

The Supermicro X7DAE is an extended ATX motherboard built around the Intel 5000X chipset for dual LGA771 Xeon processors. It targets professionals maintaining legacy compute clusters or specialised server workloads that still rely on DDR2 FB-DIMM memory. Eight 240-pin slots accept 533 MHz or 667 MHz modules at 1.8 V. The board measures 12 in by 13.1 in and includes dual Gigabit Ethernet via the Intel 82563EB controller.

Thermals noise and power

The board operates from 208 V to 230 V AC input and provides two CPU sockets with independent cooling zones. Two PCIe x16 slots and two 133 MHz PCI-X slots share airflow paths with the memory banks, so case ventilation must handle sustained multi-socket loads. Six Serial ATA-300 ports and one ATA-100 connector draw minimal extra power, while the onboard IPMI subsystem uses Web, SNMP and Telnet for remote sensor monitoring without adding acoustic load.

Replaces older dual-socket platforms

This motherboard upgrades systems that previously used single-socket or lower-bandwidth chipsets and now need 1333 MHz front-side bus throughput. The jump is worth it when workloads scale across two Xeon 5000 series processors and require the combined memory bandwidth of eight FB-DIMM channels. Buyers who need newer memory standards, single-thread optimisation or integrated modern storage interfaces will not be served by this platform.