Pros: It did boot. Had all the peripheral choices I was hoping for.

Cons: Began acting erroneously after about a week (just after I disposed of the box, of course). At first, appeared as faulty memory and/or faulty PSU, but both checked out on other hardware. My best guess was faulty cpu, as it was reporting different amounts of cache depending on bootup. Have RMA'd.

Pros: - low power
- 64bit
- 4 gig ports built in (Intel NICs)
- server grade
- lots of expandability
- full size DIMM slots

Cons: - pricey

Other Thoughts: I've had this in service since May. Running VyOS this has been an incredibly stable platform. I've pumped 54 terabytes of data through this no problem. My internet connection is via Fiber To The Node, and I can easily sustain over 5MiB/s with 6iMB/s peaks.

I had some spare Buffered ECC DIMMs lying around from previous server upgrades, Booting from a budget SSD this thing is incredibly reliable. I would consider using this to build a low power ZFS server too as it has plenty of SATA and it would be trivial to add a PCIe SAS controller.

Pros: Allows for decent amount of RAM. Network ports to spare, cool, low power requirements. PCIE expandability. Works with Freenas. Doesn't necessarily require ECC ram. great for a pure storage server. Feature rich bios. IPMI. Internal USB A for flash drive boot. LED headers for everything one could imagine. In my case allowed for a build where drive access is the only noticeable sound.

Cons: no support for reg ecc. pricy relative to CPU power. onboard sata is pretty basic. fan control didn't appear as functional as other super micro boards. Slow boot of bios prior to legacy OS load. IPMI is nice to have but the client super micro is rather finicky.

Pros: The board offers a decent amount of speed for a SOHO server, and supports more than enough memory for a FreeNAS box running ZFS (though I'm still running CentOS on mine for now).

I've been spoiled by DRAC and iLO remote console features at work for years, and it's nice to finally have them on a low-power box at home too.

The Intel network interfaces are a nice bonus as well, and they work in conjunction with the CPU cores to easily allow for wire speed transfers using SCP (which the many years old IBM Xeon box with its Broadcom interfaces could not).

Cons: The Java-based remote console works fine on Linux and Windows systems, but it just hangs and pegs the CPU on my MacBook (with Yosemite and Java 8u25), which is unfortunate.

Some of the headers/front panel connectors on the motherboard are in less than ideal locations (the 3rd and 4th NIC indicator headers are far away from the first two).

Other Thoughts: If you're trying to install Red Hat or CentOS on the board, you'll want to make sure to adjust the BIOS so that it's in UEFI mode rather than legacy mode. I do believe legacy is the default, which I did not notice. This is under PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration, specifically the "Storage" item. With it set to Legacy, CentOS 7 wanted to do the bootbios partition, which it did, but it failed to install the boot loader on numerous installs.

Switching it to UEFI allowed CentOS 7 to install without incident, and should probably be the default (IMHO).

Pros: Running the latest RC of pfSense and works great! (Read the tweaks about network cards to optimize). Note: I only have a few users, and not running a lot of packages, so I'm not sure how well it will run CPU wise for more of a business application.

Runs very cool as well.

Cons: n/a

Pros: Okay, got it setup with FreeBSD 10.1, zfs with everything to boot, and a 10gbe for storage backend. CPU's aren't the fastest, but with 4 WD Red's it's using about 51 watts.

Cons: CPU speed isn't exactly a xeon... surprise.