SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard

Pros: IPMI is a must have for any production or development box for a business Extremely robust EFI interface ECC RAM Support

Cons: No 6Gbps SATA, but that's a different model number. Just a note: this is 3Gbps SATA ONLY. Long boot time. The EFI takes a good 45 seconds to a minute before you ever see even a POST screen. (system will beep before it POSTs.)

Overall Review: Great board to base a small form factor (half depth 1U) powerhouse on. I combined this with an E3-1230, 16GB of RAM, and a Corsair Force 90GB SSD for a virtualization testbed. IPMI is great and easy to setup. Numbers are amazing with these new E3 Xeon's. Whole system consumes 20w idle, and 116w under full load. I now own 3 systems total all identical. Great motherboard. NOTE: You need the SNK-P0046P Supermicro heatsink for this board if you are putting it in a 1U enclosure.

Pros: Used this board for a home NAS/virtualization platform. Coupled nicely with the CSE-731i-300B case - a single ribbon cable from the case front panel connects to the mobo headers for power button and all status lights. I'm running Solaris 11 (mostly for ZFS) and Virtualbox and was pleased to find all the drivers were present with the OS. A generic SATA DVD works fine, and all 6 SATA ports work as hot-plug AHCI - yes I've hot-swapped one. Dual LAN is nice, and a dedicated port for IPMI is the best. I can't say enough good things about the remote management capability.

Cons: None

Overall Review: My rig: - SUPERMICRO CSE-731i-300B case - SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 mobo - 4x Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/4G (16GB) memory - Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz - 3x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM in RAID-Z - StarTech SATABAY425BK 4 Drive 2.5in Hot Swap Backplane - 2x older 250GB drives mirrored for OS - 1 3.5" in the drive cage and 1x 2.5" drive in the hot swap backplane - SATA DVD

Pros: Remote console with virtual media support, UEFI support, support for Xeon and 'regular' i3/i5 CPUs. Dual LAN ports and works fine with an Intel i350-T2 dual port network card.

Cons: I can't fault Supermicro for this, but one of the NIC ports isn't supported by VMware ESXi. I knew this going in and bought an added Intel dual port card to have a dedicated port for iSCSI and be able to play with SR-IOV (supported by the CPU, the board and the i350 Intel NIC (when using ESXi 5.1).

Overall Review: Those that mention the memory requirements and/or limitations in regards to requiring unbuffered ECC, didn't check the memory requirements of their CPU. As of the Intel Nehalem series processors (like the Xeon 5500-series), Intel added the memory controller to the CPU (like AMD had been doing for years before that already). This means that memory type support is determined by your CPU, not the motherboard. The Xeon E3-series only supports unbuffered ECC memory. To support RDIMMs on the newer generation CPUs, you'd have to upgrade to the Xeon E5-series (socket 1356 (E5-2400/1400) or 2011 (E5-1600/2600), so a completely different motherboard).

Pros: Very stable. Supports 32 GB ECC memory. 6 on-board SATA ports. IPMI. 2 Intel NICs.

Cons: 3 GB/S SATA only.

Overall Review: I started looking at x9 series Supermicro boards because they are recommended on the FreeNAS forums. I settled on the MBD-X9SCL-F-O because I wanted IPMI and ECC memory and planned to use the 6 onboard SATA ports for a ZFS RAIDZ2 array, and I didn't think 6 GB SATA would be much benefit with 7200 RPM drives. Overall the motherboard has been flawless. I definitely recommend this board, especially in combination with the e3 CPU and ECC memory below. For the money this is a powerful and stable combination. My buld: LIAN LI PC-V354B Black Aluminum MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 3TB 7200 RPM drives

Pros: Awesome MicroATX board, lots of fan headers, IPMI KVM feature works excellent. Max memory is 32GB.

Cons: None really, see other thoughts.

Overall Review: This isn't really a board's fault but LAN2 port is not supported by VMware ESXi 4.1u1. I've been using ESXi with SuperMicro boards for a while and this is the first time I had this issue. 8GB sticks not widely available, using 4 x 4GB for now, will upgrade later if needed. Using VMware ESXi I never plug keyboards\mice\monitors to these servers but the KVM-over-LAN feature is awesome. Can power off/on/reset server with BMC.

Pros: - Works good - Dual LAN plus IPMI - 3 PCIe slots is great for RAID, network, and phone cards - Can use commodity LGA 1155 processors, like the Intel Core i3 2100

Cons: - A bit expensive, though not bad - Requires ECC memory - Slow to boot

Overall Review: Bought this for a 16 disk RAID file server, with 8GB RAM and an Intel Core i3 2100. It works great! The dual LAN is useful if your machine is dual-homed or if you want to bond the interfaces for higher bandwidth. The 3 PCIe x8 slots are great for adding RAID, network, and FXS/FXO cards. The fact that it can use cheap commodity processors is wonderful; plenty powerful and reliable enough for most server uses. It's more expensive than using a desktop board, and being a server board it requires ECC memory, but the cost really isn't that much more. It's worth it to get these features this board has. Also, it takes a surprisingly long time to POST (over 30 seconds!), but being a server, you probably won't be rebooting it very often.

Pros: Low price for server motherboard

Cons: None

Overall Review: I needed to build a storage server for our domain. I felt I could do better and get more speed if I built my own rather than buy an "of the shelf" NAS. Here is what I used: Server 2012 Standard SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O Intel Core i3-2105 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 LSI MegaRAID SATA/SAS 9260-4i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard memory RAID Controller Card, Kit Thermaltake RC2300101A MAX-2533 5.25" (x2) Bay to 3.5" (x3) Bay Mobile Rack (3) Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Nice solid board. Had to update LAN drivers from web site to get most recent updates but works good. Solid Board.

Cons: None