2/2 I’ve had limited experience with both Sandy and Ivy bridge-E in their HEDT form, but was lucky enough to experience both as “server” class variants via EVGA’s fabled SR-X, a Dual socket 2011 HPTX MB, which supported Gen 1&2 Xeon E5 CPUs and harboured an adapted s606 chipset, paired with a PLX (multiplexer) chip, which effectively doubled the board’s PCI-E lane quota and enabled 4 of its 7 full length x16 slots to receive up-to 40 Lanes allocated directly from the primary CPU.
This after market addition meant the SR-X was the only Dual CPU board (besides its iconic predecessor, the SR-2) on which I was able to successfully get a triple GPU implementation of Nvidia’s “3-D vision surround” working.
This special mode allows each screen in a multi-monitor setup to display a “spanned” portion of a game’s rendered images, and can be enabled with one graphics card connected to separate displays via different physical outputs but in SLI setups, each card can be hooked up to individual displays, with its GPU assigned to render specific portions of the spanned image. This technology was an effective precursor to the ultra wide aspect ratios and resolutions that Samsung, LG and others now offer on so many of their curved LED panels.
On other Dual CPU boards without a PLX chip, whose x16 slots and lanes were shared between both processors, only two cards out of three were detected in 3D Vision Mode, though conventional 3 Way SLI was still possible!
In all other respects, the board was considered a “flawed” masterpiece because all Xeon E5-2xxx (which featured upto 12 hyper-threaded cores) were gimped by locked multiplies, meaning the only method by which to OC was bumping up the B clock, which was inextricably linked to both the PCI and system bus, and hence caused instabilities when run only a handful MHz above their collective default frequency!