This board draws power efficiently, idling with a GTX 1660 super, 4x enterprise SAS hard drives, 2x NVME drives, 2x SSDs, a Ryzen 5 1600, 2x fans, and a AIO CPU cooler at a mere 40 watts. Its chipset handles heat well: I have seen 0 meaningful throttling at hot-but-not-alarming temperatures. It's currently running unRAID booting from the internal USB3 (needed to buy an adapter) with 8 drives in to a SAS controller sitting in the x4 PCIe expansion. unRAID boots to the internal graphics which is nice and I have a R9 Nano for a Windows VM and an old AMD card for Server 2016 VM. I have a USB soundcard in one of the rear USB ports and a small hub in the other for the keyboard and mouse. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, as well as trace, captures from different VDI environments. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices.

I like that they’re working well but I’m worried that I’m not fully getting my money’s worth with this RAM. Any thoughts? Second, the electronics. The primary and secondary PCIe slots share 16x worth of lanes. This is absurd! If you have anything plugged into the second 16x slot, all 8x of its power is robbed from the primary 16x slot, and not from the 4x where you might expect. This means that you have to choose between your GPU getting its full bandwidth and power OR running an expansion card on the secondary physical 16x lane and having both cards operate at 8x power. This is a massive flaw in my opinion, even if it only affects some users. I cannot think of a good reason why the lanes are allocated like this rather than isolating the primary 16x lane and netting a little extra power to split 12x across the remaining slots. Each Sysbench VM is configured with three vDisks: one for boot (~92GB), one with the pre-built database (~447GB), and the third for the database under test (270GB). From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 60GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller. Populated with 64GB of fast 3200MT/s ECC DDR4 (Kingston p/n# KSM32ED8/32ME), 8C/16T Processor (Ryzen 7 2700), + Adaptec RAID Controller with it’s own dedicated DDR cache memory and SSD cach for hot data provides me with a balanced system. The dedicated RAID offloads the processor, so my system is well positioned to run multiple virtual machines. Along the front are four bays for hot-swapping 3.5” or 2.5” SATA drives. This will go a long way for adding capacity while keeping the price down. Assuming you want to max out capacity on this guy, four bays isn’t enough. The good news is that there are three more internal 2.5” bays. These bays are fixed, not swappable, and they too are SATA. This gives users even more options for adding low-cost capacity ideally with 2.5” SSDs or slim HDDs if you must.

The above usage scenario still leaves me with one available open-ended PCIe x4 slot for expansion, which is not bad at all. As said in a previous review, there hasn't been a BIOS or BMC update for some time which is disappointing. I needed a board to run unRAID as a file server and as well as hosting a VM or two. A board capable of taking two graphics cards, a x4 SAS controller and the ability to remote admin. AMD CPU's are great value at the time of writing and following an upgrade had a R7 2700X to use - So this board fitted the bill.

Looking at performance, we used two SN850 SSDs to get a feel for the peak system capabilities. For our Application Workload Analysis, we did the testing a bit differently using only 2 VMs for SQL Server and then 4 VMs for Sysbench. SQL Server gave us an aggregate average latency of 2ms. For Sysbench we saw aggregate scores of 3,210 TPS, 36.5ms for average latency, and 264.5ms for worst-case scenario latency. In our worst-case scenario (99th-percentile) latency test we saw the server hit an aggregate of 264.5ms with individual VMs 249.2ms to 276.1ms.So, BMC functionality is there and works pretty well, at least the web management interface. SSH allows only a single session at a time and my system thinks it has an existing active session when it does not. Haven't tried sol. The remote KVM works. I have not tried to install an OS onto the server using the BMC but that is supported by the web interface. Ok, so this board is not perfect. I will start with what I believe to be a design flaw that I currently suffer through, but that may be a deal breaker for many prospect buyers. There is a fundamental and inherent layout and power delivery design incompatibility: you have three PCIe lanes that fight for space and electronics, and there are no ideal configurations to maximize the potential of this board.