Pros: Quiet, when it works.

Cons: I have been a loyal SeaSonic customer for many, many years, none of their product failed me, until this one. When I got it, the packaging didn't look quite new - although I bought it directly on Newegg and it is said to be new. I thought - that might be caused by transportation - it should still be quite reliable. Anyway, it died after less than 48 hours, with just one GTX770 (450W) and a Intel 4771, one harddrive and one SSD. Replaced it with an old Seasonic X 750W, the system now works perfectly. Hard lesson learnd - Don't save the few bucks on power supply - this S12G series is the low end line of SeaSonic anyway. Go with the X series.

Pros: Lots of ports. dual NIC.

Cons: Defective right out of the box - memory stick only works in A1/A2 channel, does not work in B1/B2 channel. Updated to latest BIOS version and tried MemOK, not working. RMA.

Pros: Easy to install Stable after correctly flashed the firmware

Cons: The server came with a pretty old firmware which cannot identify my XEON L5410. Also, virtualization settings can't be reconized by XenServer. So I followed the manual and flashed it with version 1003, the processors were identified, good. XenServer can be installed this time, good. But.... what? CPU temp read 0C/32F? 2.33GHz CPU running at 2GHz? The fans were always running at full speed which sounds like a huge vaccum machine? Random crashes inside the VMs? Tried to install ESXi, it couldn't even install, and report "different freqs for the two CPUs", WHAT? the two processors were not even running at the same speed? after two days research on the problem, I found that you need to use AFUDOS ROMFILE.ROM /P /B /N /C to flash the firmware AND clean up everything including CMOS/nvram/boot block. Just reset CMOS didn't work on my machine. After reset all settings, the server ran smoothly.

Overall Review: First, it would be better if I can get a server with decent firmware, not something can't even support 54xx. Second, if the firmware upgrade can't be made by ASUS for some reason, they needs to update their manuals to tell people how to properly upgrade. The current steps will only mess up the server. I don't know how many people returned the server, but I do believe that is not just a few.