well, i can confirm the board I received had an old BIOS version and I had to pull a E5-2660 (v1) CPU from another server to power it on and update the firmware. the board already had IPMI firmware version 2.0, which is the minimum requirement to flash to the latest BIOS to support v2 CPUs, but I upgraded that as well.
i can also confirm, the firmware and BIOS for this board are identical to the X9DR3-LN4F+, and so is the manual. So, nothing to worry about if you see mentions of it's sister board in the BIOS setup.
after IPMI + firmware upgrade, I popped in the E5-2680v2 pair i just got, but it got stuck at "System initializing... BF". According to Supermicro, this is either bad CPU IMC, bad DIMM module, or bad DIMM slot. I took out the 2nd CPU and RAM module I had for testing, and just booted with 1 CPU and 1 DIMM and it booted up fine. I then added 2nd CPU, and then the system powered on, shut off, and powered on again and recognized the 2nd CPU just fine. I then added the DIMM to the 2nd CPU and it worked just fine and never saw the "BF" code again. I later added 12 DIMMs total and still booted up fine.
overall, very happy with this purchase. i got the CPUs for $165 each.