I’m considering an AM5 build for ECC and am deciding between the ASRock Rack B650D4U, GIGABYTE MC13-LE0 and Supermicro H13SAE-MF.
Which manufacturers are the best for reliability and providing support even if you buy the boards from outside the US or third party sellers?
I’m currently using a consumer Asus motherboard and the sole interaction that I’ve had with their support means I’ll never be using an Asus motherboard again. They sent me an update that bricked the onboard I225-V when I reported issues with it and tried using an excuse of buying it from outside my country as a reason to deny me support. So support for when things goes wrong is pretty important for me.
I thought ASRock Rack had a good reputation until I saw the horror stories regarding B650D4U failures. It also seems like ASRock Rack is really slow with bios updates.
For the Supermicro H13SAE-MF, I can get the latest bios but can’t seem to find any revision history to get a sense of how often they update their boards.
I don’t know much about Gigabyte.
IMO you may want to look at it from a slightly different perspective: how many SKU’s to they make and how many of those turn out defective-by-design?
That’s a good point regarding the reliability of that specific model.
The slow bios updates seem to be a legitimate issue though, but I’m unsure how much that really matters in practice.
Unlike gaming PC’s, on enterprise stuff you really don’t want a BIOS update if you can avoid so. So manufacturers are hesitant releasing BIOS updates unless there’s a very real reason to do so (security related, primarily). BIOS updates as a measure of support is (for enterprise boards) therefore not really useful.
I have had 3 AsRock Rack boards so far and never had issues with the board itself.
The first one was a C2750D4I. That one ended up failing on me after a year or so. Contacted AsRock and it was swapped out during RMA no questions asked. The second board ended up failing on me about 2 years later (I didn’t bother contacting AsRock Rack for the second one so I can’t say how they’d have handled a second failure).
However, it turns out the C2750 was one of the CPUs that was affected by the intel clock generator bug which is likely what killed mine, so I can’t blame that on AsRock Rack - hence no issues with the board itself.
The third is my current NAS board, an X470D4U with a 2700X in it. It’s been running for a year and a half with no issues at all.
Can’t really speak on slow BIOS updates TBH. Once all 3 of these systems ran I never fucked with the BIOS, so slow or not I can’t really say.
Don’t know much about SuperMicro other then that they are a well established brand in the server space.
As for Gigabyte I know Wendell reviewed a few of these in his server chassis and I don’t recall him having much issues with any of them.
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