Pictures dude!!! And I'm sure you can email your motherboard vender and ask if they'll send you a BIOS that supports it?
Not likely given that it's basically MSI making them for Dell. Dell don't do anything by request really. The only company ever to respond to my calls for a bios update were Asrock..
Any way the machine is up and running. I've braided most of the wiring and done a few mods to get the hard drives in.
I've also wrapped the internal fascia panel.
The front alu panel is going off to B-Negative to be painted.
As for performance? hmm, tough call. Basically my 8320 absolutely spanks it. It's not even close. I score 804 in Cinebench with my 8320 @ 5ghz, the Xeon comes back with 393.
In Firestrike it was a bit better. The Xeon hit 6900 Physics, my 8320 does around 10k.
However.. Normally I would be bummed out. Thing is, before I even bought the Xeon I had no illusions it would come anywhere close to my FX. But. I would strongly imagine my FX is chomping down a good 200w at least when overclocked. It also ends up resulting in noise, because to tame a 5ghz FX you need a dual length rad AIO with the fans running pretty hard.
The Dell I built is absolutely silent. I mean, you need to put your ears to it and even then it's a whisper. It also uses 60w, which for the power it delivers is very, very good.
The only mishap I had was accidentally pushing in the PCIE lock (it's a plastic thing) and damaging one of the fans on the Lightning. Basically if the fans go over 30% now one of them hits the shroud. The blade isn't snapped, it's just floppy and loose.
After longing for one (480 Lightning) for 6 years and finally getting one this was a real bummer. Basically the 480 Lightning is completely custom. They never re-used the cooler, fans or anything else on any other card. Later they basically slapped the same TFIII (different to the TFIII on the Lightning I may add) on any Lightning, Hawk, Thunder or just regular TFIII card.
So completely stuck (because the fans on it are 90mm and all of the others use 65-80mm) I ended up finding these in Hong Kong...
So I am going to have to mod the card. Not a problem given everything else in the machine is going to be modded but yeah, a little depressing.