Supermicro C7Z97-M

[HEXUS]

The renowned server vendor tries its hand at a consumer Z97 motherboard.

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[cheesemp]

Didn't supermicro use to do consumer boards? I'm sure I had one in the Pentium 2 I built as my first home built PC...

[DWhitley]

Didn't supermicro use to do consumer boards? I'm sure I had one in the Pentium 2 I built as my first home built PC...

Yes, my first home built computer used a P5STE. Socket 7, if I remember correctly. It was supposed to support USB, but didn't.

[MRFS]

What it needs is at least two (2) NVMe U.2 ports,
and RAID support in the chipset.

[silenthill]

Sli & crossfire support would be a must for me so a big No specially when there is other options out there

[CampGareth]

Well that's interesting. At work we use Supermicro, Dell and HP servers, of the three I prefer Dell as they try and succeed in tying all the bits together themselves, meaning the bios is decent, the BMC firmware is good, the case design is great etc. Supermicro leave most of it up to the user so their bios works, the BMC firmware is buggy to say the least and the case design leaves a lot to be desired (heavy reliance on the cheapest, flimsiest plastic cowlings possible).

However, what I've always said is that Supermicro's leave it to the user approach is actually by far preferable in the high end computer user space. While Dell try to modify drivers to work with their specific systems (in the process introducing delays, bugs) and try to replace every bit of Windows functionality with their home grown version (battery percentage readout? Why Dell why?!), Supermicro let you get your own drivers from the part manufacturers, so updates are fast and free of bloat.

TL;DR Supermicro servers = cheap but meh vs Dell, Supermicro consumer parts = Potentially epic win

[jackjack]

Great JOB SuperMicro, red and black themes works perfectly.

[jonny_boy27]

The -MF board was a dream come true in terms of the feature set we needed for a project - animal 3D imaging research project where we needed lots of local horsepower (4790K@4.6Ghz + GTX980 OC) with proper IPMI remote management (research units scattered across country). Got there in the end but by god is the BIOS a heap of crap - magically disappearing settings after overclocking, shonky 802.3x support on the BMC NIC. Finally got a stable config set but it required much re-flashing to get back disappeared features.