Looking to line out a dual hexie (Istanbul)

[Particle]

So is the BIOS on the mobo new enough for the hexies?

Not sure yet--getting ready to fire it as we speak. Even if not, this board may have an ace up its sleeve:

In the unlikely event that a Flash upgrade is interrupted catastrophically,
the BIOS may be left in an unusable state. However, SUPERMICRO's Flash ROMs have a special BIOS Recovery procedure
that can be performed. Recovering from this condition requires the following steps.

A minimum of a power supply, system speaker, keyboard and a floppy drive configured as drive A
should be attached to the motherboard. Rename the a BIOS ROM file to super.rom and insert into the floppy drive A. Press and hold the "Ctrl" and "Home" keys on your keyboard and turn on the system.
Because of the small amount of code available in the noneraseable Flash boot block area,
no video prompts are available to direct the procedure. In other words,
you will see nothing on the screen.
The procedure can be monitored by listening to the system speaker and looking at the floppy drive LED.
When the system beeps and the floppy drive LED is lit,
the system is copying the BIOS recovery code into the Flash device.
As soon as the floppy drive LED goes off and the system speaker get 4 beeps, the recovery should be complete.

Looks like it can do a "recovery mode" flash without a working CPU. All the minimum requirement items can be controlled directly from the non-programmable flash and chipset only.