Pros: I bought this board a year and a half ago as the basis for a normal daily driver/MSoffice/webbrowsing computer. I chose it for the ECC capability— have you ever had to troubleshoot a computer with sliiiightly flakey RAM that Memtest couldn’t nail down as the issue? Yeah, that’s fun. Definitely a “never again” type thing. It was paired with a bog-standard G4500 Pentium. It sees a lot of web video usage. The onboard video port selection is great. I can toss a larger graphics card in, if and when it’s needed. I appreciate the M.2 port immensely-- the next hard drive for this computer will probably be a M.2 SSD. The board’s BIOS is wonderful. I was able to change the RAM timings for a little speed boost, and I verified ECC as working by taking it to the edge and a little over, stability wise, and then running the pro version of Memtest. It shows when the ECC does it’s thing while the test battery is running. I did the same thing to verify with my old AMD Sabertooth motherboard.

Cons: I have no real complaints. MSI, please do a board like this for Ryzen 2.

Pros: This board has ECC. The build quality was good, and component installation was simple. The ram installation was slightly finicky. I had to reseat it twice when I added the second 16GB set. This should go in the cons section, but I've written a wall-o-text detailing the driver situation, so I'm putting it here instead. Did I mention it has ECC?

Cons: Audio, and Drivers. First, the drivers. Intel is cruel to everyone who buys this board. Their driver utility will laugh at your sorrows as you realize that it can't detect server chipsets, and your lingering hopes will be crushed by trying to use their horrible website. Spoiler alert, their website doesn't have the drivers either. Once you've conceded defeat on that front, you are forced to turn to the drivers cd that ASRock Rack provides (or go to their website), which are all impressively out of date. They are also incomplete. There is one bus(?) that device manager kept complaining about, and the ASRock Rack driver disk (and website) simply didn't have the driver for it. After wearing out several google datacenters trying to find help for my unusual scenario, I turned to iobit’s Driver Booster *shudder* That is NOT an optimal solution. The program did its job and found the one driver I needed (and found up-to date ones for the rest of the chipset components as well) but it sure made me nervous, it being free-ish ware and all that. Kind of like intentionally installing benign(?) malware on your system. Bleh. There is one more thing. The audio hardware has static and popping noises when adjusting volume, and muting/unmuting, booting up, or even just sitting there sometimes. I’m heavily considering getting an audio card to get away from the constant low level static sounds in the background of my music. Annoying.

Overall Review: This board and I have a complicated relationship. In many ways it’s a nice, solid, ECC motherboard, and I feel confident about its longevity, given its lack of flakiness so far. But on the other hand, there’s the drivers, the audio, and the fact that your RAM speed is locked to 1600 or below, and you cannot change the timings. I shelled out a pretty decent premium for 1866 Mhz RAM, and enjoyed adjusting the timings downward for the (admittedly small) speed increase whilst using my old board. This board will allow none of that, so I would have been better off getting slower, significantly cheaper RAM if I could have foreseen the future. Oh well, such is life I guess. The ECC is more important. Maybe one day they can update the bios or something. And finally in closing, I just want to mention how I ended up buying this board in the first place. I previously was running a sabertooth 990fx, and a bulldozer chip (and enjoying ECC support and a fully overclockable system), but the cpu power plug socket melted in a tragic thermal event (burnt plastic smells funny.) And that is how I bought this board in the first place. Hope this review helps someone.