SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SLH-F-O uATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150 Intel C226 DDR3 1600

Pros: ECC memory, PCIe3, 6 SATA III + RAID, USB3, IPMI/headless/VGA, 5 FAN headers all 4 pin PWM, 2 NIC's + IPMI NIC, support for Xeon v3 CPU's. Responsive support.

Cons: Trouble with low RPM FAN's. BIOS upgrade via IPMI requires an extra $20 license. Poor documentation you have to call support.

Overall Review: Great server/workstation board. Here some info people may find useful: You can use any fan header for hooking up the CPU fan. The FAN speed is configurable via IPMI but has limitations. It assumes you are running server fans (high RPM). If you install low RPM high efficiency fans (for a server hosted in an small business office) the fan controller thinks the fans are not functioning properly and is spinning up *all* fans to max RPM. Then the fans RPM decreases because the temps were low anyway and controller thinks again that the fans are malfunctioning and spins them up to max. This will go on forever. There is no way to adjust the lower limit for the fan alert in IPMI. Support did not have any solution. The fix for me was to change all the high efficiency fans from PWM (4 pin) to 3 pin by using the fan's included adapters (Noctua). The fans still change speed with the load but because of the open feedback loop the controller stopped spinning them up to max. I should have take one start from the review for the fan issue but given the workaround I'll leave it in. BUT for someone planning to use the IPMI alerts for monitoring in a datacenter this is a deal breaker. When upgrading the BIOS and/or IPMI firmware make sure you first upgrade the BIOS and then the firmware. If not you may brick your board. If you want to use the IPMI to remotely upgrade your BIOS you need to buy a license. The part number you need is SFT-OOB-LIC. Search on Inet for it. It took more than one week to get it via email when there is not shipping involved. Add to this that this is an additional $20 instead of being included with he board. You do not have to buy IPMI software to get to the IPMI UI. Just set the IPMI NIC IP address via BIOS and then just go to http://<yourIpmiNicAddress>. If you want to get the remote console working you will have to install Java.

Pros: No issues so far.

Cons: Finding compatible memory can be tricky.

Overall Review: I had a little trouble finding compatible memory so wanted to let people know that Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 Server Memory w/TS Model KVR16E11K4/32 is compatible. This RAM works is working without issues.

Pros: E3 V3 Very Fast and Efficient

Cons: ESXi doesn't recognize NIC cards and wont install. On board RAID controller isn't recognized by windows 2008 r2. USB motherboard connector blocked by pcie cards in 1u chassis.

Overall Review: This board would work great as a workstation rig. Stay away if using for hosting. Go with the E3 V2 instead.

Pros: * C226 chipset includes VT-d for passthrough - must-have for anyone doing virtualization * 5x 4-pin PWM fan headers * 6x 6Gbps SATA3 ports * IPMI is extremely handy and is also a must-have for any server builds - no busting out an old VGA monitor for this * 2x 1Gbps NICs in addition to the IPMI NIC * ESXi 6.0 ISO from VMware works without a hitch - no additional drivers needed to be added for my setup, not even the NICs * Haswell E1200v3 series processors are super fast * Fairly easy to navigate BIOS with enough features and configuration * Fairly reasonably priced given socket 2011 prices

Cons: * Full-length GPUs block 3 or 6 SATA ports (my GTX650 Ti Boost and GTX770 both block 3, leaving one row). It must be pretty difficult to put SATA ports anywhere else on motherboards since almost every manufacturer seems to keep doing this. I realize it's a MicroATX board so I understand cramped space, but ugh. * 16x length PCI-E port only runs at 8x. I was going to have a HTPC VM within ESXi and pass a graphics card though - when I ran Windows on the bare metal, my vendor GPU utility said my card only reached 55% utilization, and I had stuttering in Diablo 3. Now I know why. ** Sub-note for NVIDIA GPUs: only Quadro cards will initialize within a VM. NVIDIA has prevented GeForce cards from working. It will show up in Device Manager but it will not initialize. You can potentially hard-mod (remove resistors on) your GPU to make it identify as a Quadro, but if you're thinking about doing an all-in-one build like me, go for AMD as it's a lot cheaper than getting a Quadro and a lot less dangerous than trying to remove tiny resistors (tried it) * Max 32GB of RAM - would love an extra 4 RAM slots to bump it up to 64GB in the future, but maybe I'll just build a new box down the road? * 4 GBe NICs would be nice, but I could get a PCI-E card down the road if I find any reason to use more than 2 NICs * Would be nice if the board wasn't colored the stereotypical seafoam green, black maybe? But this isn't even really a con, just a minor complaint.

Overall Review: I decided to build a home virtualization server for all purposes I could think of. Ideally, I wanted it to run every server I could think of running, plus an HTPC/gaming VM. Turns out GeForce cards are prevented from doing this. Regardless - it is one beast of a machine and I love it. Here are all of the VMs I have now, and ones I plan to spin up: * Windows Server 2012 R2 (Primary Domain Controller) * Debian 7 (Splunk) * Debian 7 (OpenVPN) * Debian 7 (General tools, scripts, etc) * Windows 8.1 Pro (General tools, scripts, etc) * FreeNAS 9.3 (RAIDZ1 – 3x6TB for 10.91TiB usable) * Planned: Postfix/Dovecot mailserver; Suricata IDS/IPS (possibly inline); Windows PKI Servers, Root CA and Signing CA; Minecraft/Starbound server This is all possible for a little over a grand, with an extra $750 going into my RAID drives. I’ve got a 4GB flash drive w/ ESXi, with an "old" 250GB Crucial M500 as my main ESXi datastore and an "old" 240GB M500 that I plan on swapping in whenever I feel like transferring the data to an "old" 128GB Crucial M4. Dem SSDs doe. I still have yet to really stretch my legs and see what ESXi is capable of, but my needs are fairly simple and I want to ensure as much uptime as possible – this is as much a lab as it is a production environment at home. It took me about 2 weeks to get everything the way I wanted, hitting speed bumps along the way, resulting in me buying a SAS card and ditching my plans to use this machine as an HTPC/gaming rig. I didn’t plan on buying the SAS card but you can only pass through an entire AHCI controller to ESXi, meaning my datastore drives have to be on a different controller than my NAS drives, which I passed through directly to FreeNAS. Raw performance tests on datastores are very pleasing, peaking around ~520MB/s read and ~430MB/s write to my 250GB Crucial M500 running ATTO Benchmark. RAM passed Memtest86 with flying colors. With all 8 vCores pegged with Prime95, the CPU never got above 52C after about 15 minutes. It idles around 31-33C so I’m happy about that. Note: if you get low RPM fans, the mobo may detect the low RPM as being critically low, and will ramp all fans up to max RPM for a few seconds. This can be fixed by changing the thresholds with ipmitool. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SLH-F-O (LGA1150) CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1246v3 3.5GHz (so fast! like a 4790 but cheaper) RAM: 16GB Crucial Unbuffered ECC DDR3-1600 (CT2KIT102472BD160B) Case: Fractal Design Define Mini (not so Mini, but solid and monolithic) CPU Cooler: Corsair H60 Thermal Paste: Arctic Silver 5 (old faithful) Fans: 3x Noctua NF-F12 (2 front intake, 1 rear CPU exhaust – so quiet!) RAID/HBA controller: IBM ServeRAID M1015 (Community favorite - flashed to IT firmware) Datastore drives: Crucial M500 250GB, Crucial M500 240GB, Crucial M4 128GB (from old machines) FreeNAS RAIDZ1 drives: 3x 6TB Western Digital Purple (10.91TiB usable) PSU: Corsair HX750 (from old gaming rig) Router/Layer 3 switch: MikroTik CRS125-2

Pros: Bought this, as it is socket 1150 and has the Haswell C226 chipset, and three PCIe slots. I used my soldering iron to open the end of the x8 slots so I could put in two more video cards. Oh yes, they're recognized, although one runs at 8 bit and the other at 4. So I have three AMD 7990 video cards, all water-cooled with EK blocks, and a SwifTech CPU pump/block. Half-inch cooling lines and a twin EK radiator mounted on the back edge of the case on a piano hinge. Nice fluorescent green Phobya non-conductive coolant. It is a sight to see! And boy, does it hash.

Cons: For days I've been trying to determine whether the C226 chipset will support a SATA port multiplier, as those d4mned SATA ports are right in the way of my 12" video cards. Well after trying port multipliers from DataOptic, Silicon Image, and two from Syba, none work, whether I plug them in to port 3, 4, or 5, even though I'm running the ACPI driver.

Overall Review: I had lots of trouble with the AMD proprietary driver crashing on boot as soon as it was time to go graphical. Finally I remembered I'd changed some BIOS setting in the board to make something faster. So I went back into the BIOS and set it back where it was, and then no more crashes for the AMD card, thankfully.

Pros: IPMI is pretty nifty if you do not want to use a monitor. USB 3 directly on the MoBo is nice if you want to boot off a usb drive. I chose to use usb to boot my vmware.

Cons: There isn't much documentation on where the CPU fan needs to go, so I just plugged it into the first numbered fan port.

Overall Review: This works well with 4 pinned fans. I should have gone with those.

Pros: The board woks as advertised.

Cons: Only negative I have is the goofy fan controls. You have no direct control in BIOS or over IPMI. You can select a basic profile, but that is about it. No info on what the profile really does. If you have low speed fans like Noctua you will also trip a low speed sensor warning that will make the fans ramp up and down. Pretty annoying. BUT, it can be fixed via shell/terminal command in Unix/Linux. I am using FreeNAS on this machine and it has "ipmitool" preinstalled. Because of this small pain in the but way of adjusting for low speed fans, I knocked off one egg.

Overall Review: How to fix the fans. Open shell and type the following command ipmitool sensor list all From the list provided find your fan headers, FAN2 for example. You will need this for the next command to set your fans lower limits. If you look across the columns you will see six sets of numbers. The fist three are the lower limits for the fan and the last three are upper limits. The first number is non recoverable limit, fail. The second is critical lower limit. Third is lower non critical limit. Next three are upper limits in reverse order. So, now the command to fix the fan issue. Look up the specs for your fan and set these limits 100-200 RPM below the fans lowest rated speed. In my case the fan is rated for 600RPM but can dip down to 500 tripping the default sensor. So, lets fix that. ipmitool sensor thresh FAN2 lower 200 300 400 This is case sensitive, so make sure you match the sensor as it is listed in the above list. In my cas FAN1 FAN2 FAN3, and so on. Rerun the list command again to verify it worked. Repeat for all fans in the system

Pros: It works. USB3.

Cons: Supermicro is my last choice when it comes to buying a server motherboard. This board is a great example why: No manual, had to look up front panel jumper diagram online When using their website, typing in 'X10SLH-F-O' or any variant of this model number return no results, you have to use Google No driver disc, and the driver links on their site didn't work, so I had to get the C226 RSTe driver from the Intel site. Couldn't upgrade BIOS via IPMI until I read a review here. Thanks "N/A".

Overall Review: Wasted too much time digging around for info that should have been included.