For many professionals, a consumer level board may not have the features needed to satisfy their needs. Typically these boards include additional network functions and can have more and different types of storage options such as U.2 ports or switches. The Supermicro X11SRA, the motherbaord in this review, is aimed at the workstation market that sometimes has non-consumer demands. The X11SRA works only with the Xeon-W family of CPUs, analagous to the Skylake-X Core CPUs but supporting RDIMMs and ECC for up to 512GB of memory. These systems are designed to deliver a lot of horsepower, up to 18 cores, as well as storage and other needs.

Earlier this year at CES 2018, the AnandTech team was able to stop by Supermicro's suite. One of the items on display was the X11SRA workstation motherboard, supporting Xeon W processors with ECC based DDR4 RAM and using the C422 chipset. This is a bit different to what most high-end desktop users are used to, such as X299 and non-ECC. In the past, Intel had the two families of products served by a single platform. However, they are now separated. Because of this more black and white delineation, users are seeing fewer and fewer professional-grade motherboards on the open market for the workstation processors, which leaves most sales coming from pre-built OEMs. Supermicro is one of those OEMs, but has put out the X11SRA (and its variants) on the consumer market.