BEST SELLERS

In Server Motherboards

- Setup was mostly easy, SuperMicro including the 8-pin PCIe to 8-pin EPS12v adapter was a nice touch since lots of high watt PSUs don't have 3 CPU connectors for whatever reason. All of the issues were with stupid design choices in the Fractal Define 7 XL I used. - Came updated to most recent bios and BMC versions. - Everything is very fast. - Despite lack of options for fan control, the default settings seem to do a good enough job. With a Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 cooler and two fans, prime 95's torture test running for 3 hours was never able to get the CPU to throttle or raise the temperatures of anything but the CPU much. The BMC only raised the on-CPU fans to max speed when all 32 cores were running the small FFT portion at the same time, and temps hit around 88 for a second before cooling began dropping them again. I'm not going to bother with liquid cooling, it seems to be solving a problem that doesn't exist for this situation. - The board is large enough, and the headers placed close enough to the edge, that even stupidly out-of-spec oversized GPUs like the ASRock 6900XT OC leave just enough room for (in my case) the USB-C front panel connector to be plugged in. This has been an ongoing nightmare even with more normal sized cards (Among many, many others, that were mostly Asus inflicted). 3 of the M.2 slots can't be accessed with a GPU in most locations, but honestly, how often are those going to be changed out? If I felt the need for more easily changeable internal M.2 drives I could just get a $20 PCIe 4 16x -> 4 x 4x NVMe card and fill some of the gigantic number of PCIe lanes with it, or get an M.2 -> U.2 housing. - Installing the TR Pro wasn't quite as big a nightmare as I was expecting, but my last computer was a 2011-v3 where the procedure was "set the processor on top of the pins, and force 2 tension levers closed while wondering if the horrible crunching sound was normal". Also, Asus was shipping out boards with pre-bent pins. The most complicated part of this was wondering if I'd missed the click of the torque driver that shipped with the processor (you can't miss it, it's louder than heck and the driver slips). - Despite the manual saying onboard VGA was default, seemed to boot to GPU in a PCIe slot just fine. The first boot took a very long time, so I kinda gave up and ordered a VGA cable, not having owned one since some time in the 90s. Oh well. I can show it to friends and say, "some of the most expensive servers you can get are still using this outdated garbage as a video interface for some reason". - I was kind of worried because it seemed to be missing in the manual, but any x16 slot can be bifurcated to 4x4x4x4... having the 8x8 option would be nice on the off chance that I need lanes sent over SlimSAS for some reason, but I don't see it happening. No idea what I'll possibly do in the next decade that needs more than (or all of) 512GB of registered ECC. I like having a large excess so Windows is basically running everything on my system from a ramdrive after a few days of uptime; the caching system is fantastic. It'll take roughly that long for DDR5 to get affordable if it ever does; from the leaked 9000 series Epyc memory benchmarks I saw, all of the dual channel consumer boards basically have broken DDR5 controllers right now which doesn't inspire confidence... the base speed ECC sticks running at who knows what crazy latencies are involved in 12 channel configurations should in no way have almost 8 times higher memory bandwidth than the highest speed overclocked dual channel configurations, but there you are. Usually there's good scaling from higher channel counts, but it's not usually 1:1 comparing the same speed let alone stupidly overclocked XMP garbage (wonder if that's the problem?). My 2 favorite parts about this system were knowing I'll never have to deal with XMP memory again, and knowing that I won't have to hunt for hours to find hardware without RGB lights as long as I stay away from consumer devices. ASRock is the last bastion of Sanity in desktop GPUs, providing a hardware RGB kill switch so you never have to have it on. I actually had to do a custom beige paint job because nobody makes a beige case any more (was feeling nostalgic, and angry that it didn't exist), and finding a suitable case without tempered glass and no built-in RGB strip lighting took almost a week. This incredibly dull looking motherboard was a breath of fresh air. :D Supermicro will fix the loud PCH fan issue if you're willing to send the board in, apparently.

Good price for the package Thick, solid motherboard 5 fan headers Doesn't run very hot (Mine is around 45 degrees C with the terrible fan setup I temporarily have on it.)

- Dual 10Gb Ethernet. - Remote management via OpenBMC or MegaRAC. - Up to 2TB ECC RAM. - Supports Ampere Altra processors up to the 128-core Altra Max.

With everything going for it, this board is awesome. I paired it with 128GB of ECC DDR4 RAM, a Ryzen 9 3950x, a 1TB NVMe and 2x 2TB SSDs for a monster homelab all-flash vSAN ESXi. Running vanilla 7.0 ESXi with vcenter 7.0 I have no problem loading it. Rounding up my build is a Fractal Design Core 500 Black case, a 1000W PSU and a Corsair Hydro Series H80i. IPMI is HTML5 based, very responsive and useful. There is a video card built in so you can run any Ryzen without having to install an external card. The board comes with one oculink to 4 sata splitter which can be configured as a SATA or PCIe handoff.

- CPU comes preinstalled - Plenty of PCI slots - Stable under load - Remote management interface

The BMC is a little clunky, but very helpful. I can't see myself getting another server that doesn't have it.

VGA out and 10Gbit NICs were worth the upgrade to the NT edition.