CES 2012: EVGA SR-X Dual Socket 2011 Motherboard & Power Supplies


<table class="no-border"> <tbody><tr> <td class="no-border">Manufacturer:</td> <td class="no-border">eVGA</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="no-border">Product:</td> <td class="no-border">Various</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="no-border">Date:</td> <td class="no-border">Tue, Jan 10, 2012 - 10:00 AM</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="no-border">Written By:</td> <td class="no-border">Dan Stoltz - dstoltz@legitreviews.com</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="no-border">Share:</td> <td class="no-border"> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> EVGA SR-X Dual Intel LGA2011 Motherboard

<center></center> It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were able to get our hands on the EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard. It featured dual Intel LGA1366 sockets and support for Intel Xeon processors. During our meeting with EVGA this morning, the revealed the successor to the SR-2, the SR-X! The EVGA SR-X is a dual socket LGA2011 motherboard once again for Xeon processors. If you're hoping to use your Intel Sandy Bridge-E processor, unfortunately it won't work with a pair of them due the single QPI design of the Sandy Bridge-E processors.

<center></center> Taking a quick tour around the EVGA SR-X motherboard we can see that the first socket only features four DIMM slots. To the left of the heatsink we can see a single 8pin and a single 6pin CPU power.

<center></center> The second Intel LGA2011 socket features 8 DIMM slots surrounding it, as well as the same CPU power plugs on the right side of the heatsink. Along the top edge of the EVGA SR-X we can see the voltage measure points that allow us to check the various voltages across the EVGA SR-X. The total memory capacity of the EVGA SR-X is 96Gb!

<center></center> Along the bottom of the EVGA SR-X we can see that is equipped with six SATA ports and four SAS ports. Along the bottom edge of the SR-S we can find the usual internal headers for SuperSpeed USB 3.0, USB 2.0, front panel, and everything else we usually find.

<center></center> The EVGA SR-X has a total of 7 PCIe x16 Gen 3 slots and is capable of running Quad SLI! Just above the PCIe x16 slots is a single 6pin power plug to supply extra power to the PCIe slots when running multiple graphics cards.

<center></center> The I/O panel is pretty typical of what we find on most motherboards today. We can see four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth, a single PS/2 port, a pair of eSATA ports, optical SPDIF, audio jacks, and a pair of Gigabit LAN ports. We also have a CMOS reset button, and the connector for the EVBot.

Next Page - EVGA 1500 Watt, 1000 Watt, & 750 Watt Power Supplies

Major e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are teaming up with PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, to implement a new system for authenticating e-mail senders to try to prevent the sending of fradulent spam and phishing messages.

The protocol that powers e-mail, SMTP, dates back to a more trusting era; a time when the only people who sent you e-mails were people you wanted to send you e-mails. SMTP servers are willing to accept pretty much any e-mail destined for a mailbox they know about (which is, admittedly, an improvement on how things used to be, when they'd accept e-mails even for mailboxes they didn't know about), a fact which spammers and phishers exploit daily.

Making any fundamental changes to SMTP itself is nigh impossible; there are too many e-mail servers, and they all have to interoperate with each other, an insurmountable hurdle for any major change. So what we're left with is all manner of additional systems that are designed to give SMTP servers a bit more information about the person sending the e-mail, so that they can judge whether or not they really want to accept the message.

The two main systems in use today are called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Both systems use DNS to publish extra information about the e-mail sender's domain. SPF tells the receiving server which outgoing servers are allowed to send mail for a given domain; if the receiving server receives mail from a server not on the list, it should assume that the mail is fraudulent. DKIM embeds a cryptographic signature to e-mail messages and an indication of which DNS entry to examine. The receiving server can then look up the DNS entry and use the data it finds to verify the signature.

These systems are not perfect; though both are used widely, they haven't been adopted universally. This means that some legitimate mail will arrive that doesn't have SPF or DKIM DNS entries, and so mail servers can't depend on its presence. Common legitimate operations can also break them; many mailing list programs add footers to messages, which will cause rejection by DKIM, and forwarding e-mails causes rejection by SPF. As a result, failing one or other test is not a good reason to reject a message.

These systems also make it hard to diagnose misconfigurations; receiving servers will typically just swallow or ignore mails sent by systems with bad SPF or DKIM configurations.

The large group of companies, which includes the biggest Web mail servers and some of the most common corporate victims of phishing attempts, is proposing a new scheme, DMARC ("Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance"), in an attempt to tackle these problems. DMARC fills some of the gaps in SPF and DKIM, making them more trustworthy.


DMARC's position within the mail receipt process
www.dmarc.org

DMARC is based on work done by PayPal in conjunction with Yahoo!, and later extended to Gmail. This initial work resulted in a substantial reduction in the number of PayPal phishing attempts seen by users of those mail providers, and DMARC is an attempt to extend that to more organizations. As with SPF and DKIM, DMARC depends on storing extra information about the sender in DNS. This information tells receiving mail servers how to handle messages that fail the SPF or DKIM tests, and how critical the two tests are. The sender can tell recipient servers to reject messages that fail SPF and DKIM outright, to quarantine them somehow (for example, putting them into a spam folder), or to accept the mail normally and send a report of the failure back to the sender.

In turn, this makes SPF and DKIM much safer for organizations to deploy. They can start with the "notification" mode, confident that no mail will be lost if they have made a mistake, and use the information learned to repair any errors. DMARC also allows recipients to know if a domain should be using SPF and DKIM in the first place.

Without a global rollout, DMARC can't solve all phishing and spam problems. The companies that have signed up to support the project include major recipients of phishing attempts—the various free e-mail providers—and sites against which phishing attacks are regularly made. Mail sent between the organizations will be verified using the SPF/DKIM/DMARC trifecta. Anyone using the major mail providers and the major services should see a substantial reduction in fraudulent mail. Senders and recipients who want to receive similar protection can implement DMARC themselves by following the specification that the DMARC group is working on.

Given the constraints imposed by SMTP, we may never get an e-mail system that is entirely free of malicious and annoying junk. SMTP e-mail was never designed to be trustworthy, and systems like SPF and DKIM are constrained by the inadequacies of SMTP's design. Nonetheless, mechanisms such as DMARC can still make a big difference, and with the support of these major companies, e-mail might get that little bit safer.

Hard disk drive prices are expected to fall by around 10 percent this time next month, according to industry sources speaking to DigiTimes. The price of HDDs has been abnormally high following widespread flooding in Thailand last October, which caused a severe shortage in supply as production lines were destroyed by water damage. Western Digital's factories were directly affected, causing its prices to rise by 47 percent, and a number of suppliers to Seagate were also hit as its CEO Steve Luczo described back in November.

While a return to the pricing of a year ago is unlikely due to rising costs of production, it's still comforting to hear that supply is predicted to pre-flood levels of around 175 million units per quarter by Q3 this year. However, this contradicts earlier reports that Seagate expects supply to remain well below demand for the rest of 2012 as its suppliers struggle to recover.

Sony shares tumble to 31-year low amid record losses

Sony president Kazuo Hirai Newly appointed president Kazuo Hirai will have to tackle a host of issues at Sony

Sony shares have tumbled to a 31-year low, a day after the company reported a record annual loss of 456.7bn yen ($5.7bn; £3.5bn).

Sony shares fell as much as 6.7% to 1,132 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The firm, which has been making a loss for each of the past four years, has forecast that it will return to profit in the current financial year.

However, analysts said that investors were not convinced the firm would be able to achieve that target.

"Sony is facing a lot of difficulties and the new president has not been able to produce a clear plan as to how he will turn around the company," Yuuki Sakurai of Fukoku Capital Management told the BBC.

"Even the little that investors have heard, they are not very impressed with."
'Remains at risk'

The Japanese electronics maker has been hit by a spate of issues in recent times.

Its TV business, one of its biggest growth drivers in the past, has been hit hard by increased competition and falling prices. The division has been making losses for eight years in a row.

The company has also lost ground to rivals in the gaming and mobile phone business.

Analysts say the firm has also been lagging behind in innovation and product development, which are key to growth in the consumer electronics sector.

To make matters worse, Sony has had to deal with rising costs and a strong Japanese currency which have also hurt its earnings.

Earlier this year, the newly elected president and chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, announced that the firm would cut 10,000 jobs as part of a major reorganisation.

However, analysts warned that despite the restructuring plan, a falling market share in key segments may continue to hurt Sony.

"On the whole, [Sony] remains at risk of ongoing losses in its cellular application and TV businesses, and we continue to see little prospect of a rise in valuations for the time being," Credit Suisse analysts Yuan Tian and Shunsuke Tsuchiya said in a client note.