ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 Server Board (Socket 2011, Intel C602, DDR3, S-ATA 600, SSI EEB)

Okay so I've been using this motherboard for a couple of weeks and so far so good. Good price for what it is. So many ram slots its a dream come true. I'm running 40GB ECC atm on two Intel Xeon E5 2690 CPU's with a GTX780 and I've had no crashes whatsoever. Perfect for video editing with great passmark results!The let down was that it is only USB 2.0, I didn't notice that. Had to spend an additional £25 for a decent USB3.0 card. Also the CPU fan controller isn't that great. My fans speed up when the temperature increases, but don't speed down again when the temperature decreases until I restart. Having to buy an external fan controller for £50. Also my ASRock GameBlaster soundcard from my ASRock X79 Extreme 9 was not compatible with this. Disappointing that ASRock and ASRockRack can't work together on that! Having to buy a sound card for £30. So an additional £105 to get this up to scratch. It also takes a while to boot up as it appears to restart a few times at the bios welcome screen. This might be normal with server motherboards.Besides all that, great product. Like I said stability is excellent and I like what it is for the price it is. I nearly paid £400+ for the popular ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS with less Ram slots! Crazy stuff. Enjoy! :)

This would be a great board, but the marvell controller for sata has a serious bug, if you want to use iommu forget about it because the marvell controller completely will bail out with no drives recognized.which means no GPU passthrough for KVM's and no USB pcie devices for this board will work....very disspointing indeed.

This motherboard is an absolute steal at Amazons price. If you have a case which can take the SSI-EEB form factor (which is huge) then this motherboard may even be more affordable than single socket LGA2011 boards that have less DIMM, PCIe, Storage or LAN ports.I purchased this board to use single socket due to its low price and I paired it with an E5-1650 but it also supports the Core i7 LGA2011 processors in single socket operation only. Just remember that's LGA 2011 ones like the 3930K it does not take 1366 1156 1155 or 1150 socket Core i7's nor does it take the newer LGA2011v3 i7's.The IPMI on the board is excellent too, it includes an iKVM when using the onboard graphics chip so you can view the systems screen remotely over the network regardless of the operating system in use, you can even view the BIOS screen through the iKVM which is infinitely useful for a remote server.One last thing I wanted to discuss was the ASPEED AST2300 graphics chip that is embedded in the motherboards BMC and fully integrated with the IPMI remote administration system. This chip provides a single VGA output on the back of the board and has 16MB of video memory.At first glance that graphics chip may seem woefully inadequate but I'm running Windows Server 2012 R2 on the system and it is performing absolutely perfectly. All the transitions and effects including the highly animated Windows Start Screen work flawlessly with no visible dropped frames or lagginess. I was intending to fit a dedicated graphics card before I received the board but after being incredibly impressed with the AST2300 I've decided not to bother.So to conclude the review, this board is amazing value and I'm honestly surprised it's not priced higher, I got mine from amazon for £163 and I see it has gone up slightly in price but this board is a steal at any price below £400 in my honest opinion.

As a motherboard that can take two Xeons, it seems good and works fine. Just be aware of its limitations: no USB3, no audio, only VGA graphics, some graphics cards don't work (will completely stop the board from powering on). I used an ASUS GT710 card to get an HDMI port, after a false start with another card. Also Windows 10 does not work -- it will install and run, then crash randomly. Windows 7 and Linux seem OK.Still, overall a good base for a server, which is what it's designed for.

I liked OK except could not use all RAM capacity for bioinformatics. Two RAM slots failed quickly and even though all RAM worked in all other DIMMS none then worked in H! or H2. So overall a disappointment.

Fast delivery, great customer support.I've had this board for 5 months, PC is on 24/7, most of the time rendering at full tilt or gaming and I've never had an issues with it, very stable.Huge board, fits perfectly in a Corsair 750D, System posted first time, no issues at all, running 2 x E5 2670's, 64gb 1333 mhz ram, (overclocked to 1800 mhz), GTX 970 Strix OC. Win 7 64.As this was the first "server" board I've used for a build I was slightly concerned how it would perform as a workstation/gaming machine, I haven't had a single issue with it and will be building 2 more render slaves with similar specs and extra GFX cards when I've saved up enough spondoonies.I can't fault this board at all. Being a server board there's no SLI support, but as I use this mainly for 3D rendering SLI isn't required when using 2 cards, also as mentioned in the specs it's USB 2, but no biggie to fit a USB 3 card.I play all the latest games at 1080p (mostly on full settings) DOOM, Crisis 3, Fallout 4, Assetto Corsa, DCS World (5970 x 1080), Deus Ex MD, etc etc.:)I can't post you tube links here but if you search for "budget dual xeon build" and look for a guy called "TechCity", he has videos covering the build and bios setup.