Asus Z9PE-D16 Dual LGA2011 Xeon/Intel C602-A PCH/4GbE/SSI EEB Server Motherboard (ASMB6-IKVM)

I've been through 3 of these mobo's and am yet to have one work when fully populated with memory. We had Asus on the phone with every install and verified all the other components were good but once the memory was fully populated with 64GB it wouldn't even make it to POST. After spending this much on a mobo, one would expect at least one of them to work. Apparently the problem is rampant in this design as we had 3 in a row with the same problem. And yes, our memory tested out good as we were initially afraid that was the culprit. Hopefully moving to another manufacturer will solve the problem. Too bad, I've been an Asus fan for quite some time.BTW, on our second board Asus even recognized the serial number as a problem board. Not sure how we got it.

So far, I'm not impressed. After buying this to create a heavy duty desktop, a larger-than-normal full tower case (Assa 9000) and a buncha other stuff, I found out in the manual, and not on any website and in very small print that the board had driver issues with Windoze 7 Pro. Seems the drivers aren't compatible. Then I found out that it needed a different power supply. An email to Corsair helped with that.Finally I installed Windoze Server 2012 and finally got it to come up (although the BIOS says only one processor is present.) But WServer2012 boots so slowly that I might have gone with a single processor board. I also had to install drivers for every peripheral device. Makes me wonder why Asus just doesn't add the incompatible drivers to their installation CD.The first board I got was DOA. Amazon shipped me a new one very quickly and I'm happy with that. I created a trouble case with Asus and the gentleman who "helped me" wasn't familiar with this board and gave me some totally incorrect info, although he seemed like a nice guy to talk to (at least he was a native English-speaker.)But the W7 incompatibility issue isn't looking too good. I'm gonna try Windoze 8 and hope that I can make that work.I'll update when some degree of stability is reached.

I purchased this motherboard first at Newegg, but they shipped me a dead one, and then tried to say that I bent the pins on the motherboard as the reason why it didn't work, which would have been almost amusing if it wasn't so insulting.I was putting together a dual Xeon E5-2620 system, and I liked the idea of being able to put a lot of RAM on the board. I doubt I'll max out the specs, but I did the initial setup with 2 Kingston KVR16R11D4/16 16gb RAM Chips which seemed to work really well. About two weeks later I added another set of two so I'm running it with 64 GB of RAM and two processors. Setup was a snap, though I did have to initially use the onboard video card in order to set things up and download the Bios Updates. I will say this right now --The Bios Updates are a big hassle, but will fix a lot of the problems people might have with getting off the ground.My advice would be to get yourself a flash drive and set it up to a FAT file system and not NTFS in order to download the bios updates and install them. You can get one for like six or seven bucks now and I promise you it will save you a lot of headaches if you do. My advice is to boot it up the first time with just the bare minimum of devices you need to run, do the bios updates and then install your devices after.After doing the bios updates, things booted up well. I took out the ASMB6 board because I'm using it strictly as a workstation, so I can't comment on that, but overall, I find it has been a great purchase and will serve me well for a while to come. I'm currently running it with an Asus mio-892 soundcard and GIGABYTE GV-N65TOC-2GI GeForce GTX 650 Ti Video card and everything works fine after finishing the BIOS updates.

This board runs hyper-v server great! I have an E5 hexacore and 64gb of ram and 4x gb Ethernet allows fast replication. Plenty of room for expansion. Raid cards are handled very well and performance is great.

This board uses LGA-2011v3 CPUs. The 2011v3 spec was released in May 2015. How is it that after May 2015 Asus would come out with a mother board with only 6 SATA ports and 4 of those 6 are SATA II and only 2 of the 6 are SATA III? And they call this a server board? One of the great things about dual Xeon boards is that, with dual Xeons, you have 80 PCIe lanes available compared to a very max of 22 PCIe lanes on any version of i7 motherboard. And with all those available PCIe lanes, why in the world is Asus making a board with SATA II controllers?Notice all those empty SATA connectors? Well, they're not SATA, they're SAS. And even as SAS they don't work until you install an optional PIKE board. I'd love to find something other than a SuperMicro for my next build and I was hoping it would be Asus because I have several other PCs that are Asus-based.

I still run this board on a few servers and I regret my usage of these boards. They do work but they take a lot of labor to maintain. The voltage regulation on this board is not very stable, and will cause the board to not boot if it falls outside a specific variance. It's almost too sensitive.A lot of issues were plagued by BIOS problems, and the complications caused by the iKVM module. Even the old tech team for ASUS that handled most of our cases even agreed that the KVM was the leading cause of all issues. Since the iKVM module takes over the IPMI that's connected to your board.All in all if you purchased this board in the beginning I pity you. They did end up clearing up a few issues, but they stopped updating it quickly after they realized how problematic the board was. In the end I received several free replacement products that I should have been charged for. They told me to keep them no questions asked. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the past.If you want server boards I'd recommend SuperMicro, they seem to have a lot more transparency and communication with their customers in the server motherboard market.

Great board lot of comparability. That is what I needed.