SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard

Pros: Good Little board. For those who have memory issues, try reading the DETAILS page right on this site! It clearly lists what memory you need to use. (duh!)

Cons: People that don't know what they are doing giving this bad reviews.

Other Thoughts: If it's slow you aren't using a fast enough disk! I Used a 3ware 9750i card and 4 of the new Samsung 840 Pro SSD's.

Pros: I haven't managed to find any

Cons: Its very picky on the type of Ram that it uses, and since I have had it, I have had nothing but problems. Currently, I am having an issue with Random Reboots, this is after it burned through 2 hdd (I seriously think it was the MBD that caused this)

Pros: When it works, excellent stable board that supports the latest Xeon Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Cons: Needed Sandy Bridge CPU to flash new BIOS onto boards before they would recognise an Ivy Bridge CPU.

No IPMI support (no BMC).

No fan speed control unless 4 pin fans are in use.

Out of the three boards I have ordered, so far one has a bad DIMM slot from the manufacturer. This is completely unacceptable; to top off the bad experience NewEgg wants me to pay $13 in return shipping to get it replaced! At that price I'll probably just eat the bad slot; buyer beware!

Other Thoughts: If you get one with a bad DIMM slot (apparently not all that uncommon), this is really a $173+ board, not $160 as advertised. At this new price point I would recommend going with a board that supports IPMI.

On its own this board would have gotten 4 eggs, but instead gets 1 egg because of the bad DIMM slot.

Pros: cheap, supports Xeon E3 CPU,

Cons: I would give this board 0 eggs, but the site won't let me. This is hands down the worst board I've EVER got from Supermicro. They are actually extremely lucky that I've used several of their boards before, otherwise I'd never buy their parts again, this board has been that awful.

1st: The memory MUST be un-buffered, but the only place this is documented is in passing in the middle of the user's manual - nowhere else (website etc.)

2nd: When the the SATA controller is set to RAID, it WILL NOT boot from the DVD. Nor will it boot from a separate controller. The only way I could boot from DVD was with a USB adapter.

3rd: Windows SBS 2011 Essentials so far runs like molasses in January, in Alaska! I've got a Xeon E3 1220 @3.1 GHz w/ 32 GB of RAM - this thing should SCREAM, but it doesn't. And this is with the hardware drivers installed!

Other Thoughts: Until now, I've always had nothing but good to say about Supermicro. All I can think of as an excuse for this board is they must have had a novice design it. I returned 1 thinking it was DOA (I had buffered RAM, not yet knowing it was the wrong stuff - Newegg was fantastic about the exchange). When my second board wouldn't work I called Supermicro, who informed me I had the wrong RAM. Again, Newegg was excellent about accepting my return. When the new RAM arrived, the board STILL wouldn't work. Supermicro grudgingly accepted my diagnosis of a bad board and RMA'd it for me. The 3rd board works, but with my above complaints.

Bottom line: STAY AWAY from this line. Get the more expensive family up from this one!

Pros: Good feature set for a server board, comes with 6 SATA connectors (one for each sata port). Doesn't seem like a big deal, but i've purchased boards that only came with 1/2 (despite having more sata ports on the board). SATA connectors are all in one location on-board, they also all use the same RAID controller.

Cons: The case lights/switches connector section is poorly placed, I ended up with the wires for my case extending precariously close to my RAM. Nothing a little cable re-routing didn't fix, though. -1 Egg because it does not support SATA 3.0 or USB 3.0 on board. I'm a bit new to server boards, but it seems like most of the cost was for the ability to use ECC RAM, still seems steep.

Other Thoughts: Make sure you buy the correct RAM for this board, ECC Unbuffered. Any other type of RAM will not work (I tested this to see if I could use some RAM I had lying around as backup sticks). ECC Buffered/Registered and Non-ECC RAM simply will not work at all.

Pros: Used this upgrade a backup server that could not keep up with the load. Paired it with a
XEON E3-1230
8GB of Samsung M391B5273CH0-CH9 (approved by supermicro).
HD: 5 x 3B |HITACHI 0S03230 3YR 1x OCZ OCZSSD2-1VTX30GWD
Chasis: Norco RPC 250

Installed Debian 6 and backuppc on the OCZ. Made a software RAID 6 with the Hitachi's and my backup is happy again. Using software Raid and ecryptfs along while backing up large servers can still peg this thing but it's holding up just fine.

Cons: No cons, good value

Pros: It read 8GB ram fine, booted fine in ~30 seconds, also it was very easy to boot from USB.

Cons: Two of the DIMM slots were defective. If anything was placed in them, it would not post. The two closest to the CPU worked fine, and read my 2x4GB sticks.

I had 4x4GB sticks (16GB total) and it would not post with them all placed in. I tried each on individually and they all worked fine in the first two DIMM slots, but not the two farthest from the CPU.

Tried everything, including removing the CMOS battery. Even tried a different PSU.

Other Thoughts: RMA, using refund and a bit extra to get the MBD-X9SCM-F-O model.

Pros: Great board with a big improvement over the Lynnfield in disk IO. We run these with LSI 9260 RAID cards and couldn't be happier IO improvements. Also, no problems running Windows or Linux. Though we needed get the latest NIC Drivers from the Intel site and compile them for our CentOS builds.

Cons: Seems like they are hard to get.

Pros: Everything works as expected except... (see cons)

Cons: The primary NIC works, however linux (CentOS) does not recognize the second NIC for some reason, which sucks as we had planned on doing backups of the server on our private network, instead of using the public network.