I have decided that Supermicro is a great company, actually. I gave them a call, realizing that they didn't know me (a home user/hobbyist/college prof having fun) from a hole in the wall. There, Mike helped me for 20-30 minutes, tracking down the serial number of the board (this was before I had everything in place to assemble the machine). He figured out I almost certainly had one of the newer chips with the 2.0 BIOS in it. So I went ahead much relieved. Never had to address the issue.
My board came from Newegg. Much of what I got came from other sources, though. I shopped pretty hard for the lowest prices.
The build went well and it booted up fine. I screwed up the BIOS settings trying to help Linux Mint boot w/o freezing (a video card issue), but Supermicro again patiently worked with me (newbie at such--I didn't know if I had to remove the battery before resetting the CMOS).
Darned thing runs like a charm. The only issue I have with the board is the placement of the PCI-E slots. It lacks USB 3.0 (which I knew about going in), but any PCI-E card in the smaller slot will block the Nvidia card's air flow in the x16 slot. AFAIK PCI is too slow to work well with USB 3.0...
Can give you the full specs if you wish.
