ASUS KCMA-D8 ATX Server Motherboard Dual Socket C32 AMD SR5670 DDR3 1333/1066/800

Pros: ATX format, PCI-E x16 slot, arrived with the latest BIOS supporting Opteron 4300 series, great fan control keeping machine both cool and quiet, thoroughly configurable BIOS options with great administrative features like KVM over IP and network booting.

Cons: Two USB ports. No, seriously. TWO. Two of them! BIOS will only let you configure the six available SATA (1-4, 5-6) ports as either IDE+IDE, AHCI+AHCI, RAID+RAID, RAID+IDE but *NOT* RAID+AHCI. Uses a proprietary add-on SAS/RAID solution ('PIKE') that costs well over $100 and would make this board almost as expensive as the competing Tyan product, no onboard audio, remote administration also requires an additional proprietary add-on module (ASMB4-iKVM) which I believe is around $80 (though not currently offered by Newegg), unbelievably long boot time.

Other Thoughts: Because of the limited SATA port configuration options available in the BIOS, my main boot drive, a Samsung 840 Pro series SSD had to be installed as RAID to reap any benefits of its performance over using IDE and still be able to use a RAID array with other drives on the remaining ports. However, despite Windows 7 Pro x64 installing without issue to the SSD, it and the Samsung Magician software do not recognize it for what it is, so it ultimately underperforms in Windows. TRIM appears to work, fortunately, and the Samsung Magician software can scan it, and update the firmware, but cannot run any performance tests on it or erase it. Almost all of the application's options are grayed out.

Recently, after a catastrophic system crash caused by trying to run third party temperature monitoring software (CoreTemp) because ASUS does not offer such a utility compatible with this board despite there ALWAYS being a necessity for such regardless of market segment, both onboard Intel gigabit ethernet chips got fried somehow. The problem has persisted through driver re-installation (both chips fail internal diagnostics), Windows System Restore to before the crash, Windows System Restore from Image Backup to two weeks before the crash, resetting the mobo to factory defaults, resetting the TCP/IP stack and Winsock, safe mode, bypassing router, and exists in Ubuntu installed on a separate physical drive. Definitely the NICs. Have had to request an RMA through ASUS since the board was purchased over 90 days ago. I've had plenty of system crashes on both Windows and Linux before across many platforms and have never experienced such a singular component failure before. I imagined a server/workstation motherboard would be a bit sturdier...

I've used this board to build a CGI workstation on the bones of a previous system so I was glad for the ATX form factor. Still, not being able to cram at least 4 USB ports on to this board while most enthusiast boards seem to have 6 or even 8 is just min- boggling. I can't have all my peripherals connected at once and will probably have to invest in a USB hub.

Additionally, I've experienced an odd behaviour mentioned by other reviewers about this board: unbelievably long boot up time! When I first turn on the power, the lights and fans kick on with all the usual noise but nothing happens for about 10 seconds. Then the computer appears to reboot; it goes very quiet but the lights stay on, then comes the the BIOS POST and confirmation beeps. POST, RAID Config, and if you leave it enabled, network boot screens, altogether consume about 20-30 seconds of boot time before Windows even start its boot process. Because of this, despite having an SSD (or perhaps since I can't have it on an AHCI controller), it still takes me about two minutes to get from power on to Windows desktop. I've really saved no time despite the upgrades from 7200rpm hard drives and Windows Vista.

Given all these factors, I can't recommend this board.

Pros: I have owned the board for over a year. Running dual quad core processors with 16GB of DDR3 ram and a 32GB OCZ SSD. Originally installed VMware ESXI 5.0 and updated to 5.1 a few months ago. Great hardware to run vm's on. Great motherboard to expand on.

Cons: First motherboard I received was not powering up correctly being an electronics techniction in trade pulled out the multimeter and found a schematic online and found that there was a bad capacitor on the board. Got an RMA from newegg and had it replaced within a week. Sometimes you can't help manufacturing defects which in my opinion should not effect the overall rating of the product.

Pros: Lots of features, good performance. Used it in 2 different server builds

Cons: The graphics on this board always lag, no matter what processor or OS I've used.

The real big con to this is bios support, or at least right now it is. NewEgg will not tell us what bios we will be getting for a new order. So all the C32 chips they have might not even work with it since it will need the bios update.

Of course you can't do the bios update without an older supported processor.

I wanted to use this board for another build, but I think I'll have to choose another unless I can get a confirmation from NewEgg/Asus that the ones shipping now will support the 4334

Other Thoughts: I would buy this board again, allowing I knew the bios wouldn't be an issue.

If you have the 4100 series chips, then you have no issues.

Pros: Server board in ATX formfactor. I bought this board to run with Hyper-V server. Specs:

2x Opteron 4180 (6 core)
8x Corsair 4GB DDR3 "Value Memory" (32GB total)
2x Dynatron F558 Socket F CPU Coolers

After more than one year I have upgraded the server to boot from an 80GB SSD and upgraded Hyper-V 2008 to Hyper-V 2012.

The server has 4 1.5TB Seagate SATA drives. 2x Raid 1. I am running about 15 VM's on it, but I have started to run out of RAM so I will be upgrading to 4x Kingston 16GB modules of registered memory.

This board has worked just fine, right out of the box, for what I use it for.

Cons: There are no cons when this is used as a server board.

Pros: nice dual socket mobo with lots of cool things to play with.

Cons: from the start, one of my ram slots would not start, dimm_C2. It would boot to an error saying this slot has not passed ram checks, from here i can either boot with 3 sticks or go into settings. I moved all my sticks around to every configuration, but still dimm c2 would not work.. I thought it was one of my cpus, replaced and still have problem. Updated bios, no change. The bios in system information says 12gb ram, but when I boot into windows it says 16gb (12 usable) weird? gentoo detects 12gb.

Also, another con is that my mobo will not save any settings. For example, I have a pci sata 3 card. If I set the mobo to boot from that, the next time I boot, it will boot from my sata 2 harddrive. I have to manually go into bios every time I reboot.

Other Thoughts: buying non-popular boards makes it hard for any forum or online support because there is a small community.... aka there is almost nothing online about this board, even after a year that I've had this.

system:
2x 4180 opteron
16gb GSkill ripjaws
gtx 460
sata 3 ssd

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Depending on if you use one CPU, DIMM_C2 is not used. If you use two CPU's and have 4 DIMMS, populate in slots A2, B2, C2, and D2 (2 DIMMS for each CPU). Can you tell me what memory you used? Please specify part no.

You should be able to set boot order via Boot > Boot Device Prioirty > PCI SATA 3 card as the 1st Boot Device. Do you have other settings in BIOS changed such as system clock but are lost after a reset?

My email is cl-benson@asus.com. Please reference #C1037-4590 when replying.

Thank you.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: A lot of hardware packed into a small budget. Over a year running with dual six-core Opterons and this board hasn't skipped a beat once. No complaints.

Cons: None

Pros: Been running this board in a server with 2 Opteron 6-core processors for a year now and there have only been a couple small hiccups with the system and I couldn't point any of them to this board. It has been a great board for the price.

I do have both network connections running in tangent giving greater throughput to the switch and since I got that configured we haven't had any data issues with our database as the network and software can keep up. Much better than our old server where we had data errors nearly monthly.

Cons: The onboard video isn't very good. If you have to run a Windows based OS on the system you really need to add a different video card into the system.

Other Thoughts: If I needed to build another server with this processor I wouldn't hesitate to get another one.

Pros: Initially thought that the board is a great deal for the features vis-a-vis price. Bought 2 boards. First one worked fine and server was up and performing well.

Cons: The first board was okay. When I installed the second board, it does not boot, no display. CPU fan seems okay. Tried to do all possible checks including CMOS reset - nada! I'm worried now that I got a lemon on this one. What shall I do? I don't want to go through the hassle that others experienced with ASUS support. Should I just throw this board and buy a different brand?

Other Thoughts: I don't want to waste all new parts 2 4200 cpus, fans, etc. Any recommendation for a better MOBO alternative is appreciated. For all my server builds/upgrades, I will be concerned with ASUS.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issue you had with the motherboard.

Regarding the no POST issue, a possible cause may be that the second board has an older BIOS than the first that does not yet support your Opteron 4200 CPU. Please also make sure that you are using Revision 1.02 and BIOS version 2001. You can verify the BIOS on the board by looking at a long bar code sticker containg a series of letters and/or numbers. The last four digits of that code correspond to the BIOS version.

If you've tried all possible troubleshooting, including swapping parts from the first board into the second, please consider returning to the retailer or a replacement, or send it to us for RMA.

Regards,
Benson
Asus Customer Loyalty

Pros: Newegg waived return shipping for exchange on a Tyan MOBO which is working like a champ and has top notch support.

Cons: I got a DOA MOBO in November 2011. Asus just wrote a response in June 2012 telling me to update the BIOS for to CPUs that weren't even available on Newegg when I bought this thing almost a year ago. Why respond to a 8 months old DOA review other than to attempt to negate it?

Other Thoughts: Asus, you never responded to emails and/or calls when I needed you to --so I sent your DOA crud back. Trying to respond 8 months later is just bad form. You've botched that one big time.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We replied to you because we've started a new program here at Asus to provide support online in mediums like Newegg's customer reviews.

We felt it was important to take notice of your problems with the KCMA-D8 motherboard and decided that, regardless of the date the review was posted, to provide support and service to you. We did not know what had become of the motherboard, only to assume that you still had it and believed that it was right to do to respond to you, to provide assistance to you, whether it's more troubleshooting or moving on to RMA. Not only that, we are also here to listen to feedback and comments you have about our products and services.

I thank you for the time to write back to us. Please feel free to contact me at cl-benson@asus.com.

Regards,
Benson
Asus Customer Loyalty

Pros: Great feature-rich board

Cons: Initially had endless reboot of Centos6 with no apparent log entries -- disable PowerNow in BIOS fixed that