I don’t see anything wrong with it.
Kit guru did a review on it, also posted internal pics.
And the unit looks pretty decent to me for just 80 bucks.
So yeah i agree it’s a decent deal as far as i can see.
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Hi, if you were still looking at those used haswell xeons, I think you’ll be better off buying a used asus/gigabyte/asrock board off of sites like Ebay. I’ve seem them go really cheap for about £30 and this would be a better deal than a lower quality chinese one from Aliexpress. Besides with those you can upgrade to a 22 core broadwell xeon in future.
However, given that you probably will never need that many cores, ryzen would definitely be the better option here. Also, have you tried looking into B450 crossfire options?
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The power usage kinda scares me, unfortunately
I’m not really into crossfire and this type of mutli-gpu usage, i need them for different VM’s running with pcie-passstrough, and I’ll most likely need BIOS options that may be locked on b450 boards
Also 8 sata ports and many pcie slots is a must fo me
I mean effectively Ryzen is good for two of those in PCIe3 x8 and one PCIe2 x4. And then there is maybe a couple x1 but all of those as well as the PCIe2 x4 are sharing resources with other options on the board, like the secondary M.2, some of the SATA ports and so on.
If you want that system to handle a lot of additional hardware, Ryzen might not be optimal.
Have you looked at the ASUS Pro X570 WS ACE? It’s a Ryzen motherboard that has lots of graphics slots with lanes. That has 3 pcie3 x8 (pcie 4 x4) GPU slots in it… If you need more than that though, you need HEDT or Threadripper.
I would love this board, but unless i win lottery, it will remain in “i would love that” category
well, if I am able to connect 7-8 sata drives, two gpu’s and additional ethernet card then i don’t think I will need more
Are there Ryzen boards with that many SATA ports? I don’t think Ryzens have enough PCIe lanes for GPU + GPU + ethernet + SATA cards if you needed to supplement the onboard ones.
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that’s what starts to worry me (especially if we talk about Zen and Zen+ ryzen cpus)
Just checked, apparently (according to PCPartPicker’s filters) there’s a bunch of X370, X470, and X570 boards with 8 6Gb/s SATA ports. Which is good since you’d want an X board for dual GPUs anyways, B series boards run the second as an x4 so depending on the card that could be limiting. X chipset boards should to x8/x8. IIRC they have 20 usable lanes (24, but I think 4 go to the chipset), so there should be 4 left over, plenty for an ethernet card.
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Yeah, 16 for the top slot, 4 for the main M.2 and 4 for the chipset. From the chipset you get PCIe2.0 x4 in the bottom slot wich is shared with the secondary M.2. So you have to choose one or the other.
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It should be able to split the x16 for the top two slots though, X boards support x8/x8 which is the requirement for SLI. Though yeah, you wouldn’t be able to run an M.2 drive if you needed to run another PCIe card, but for most OS uses a SATA SSD is excellent, so that shouldn’t be a big issue. Unless you already had to use all the SATA ports for something else. 
So should be possible to run a lot off a Ryzen, but if you need more than 2 GPUs, an add in card, and 8 drives or so, then HEDT is the only option. I think there’s PLX chips on some boards to add PCIe lanes somehow? Those boards are typically really damn expensive though.
For X99 specifically, I don’t know how PCIe lanes for Xeons are handled, but on the i7 side anything above the lowest SKU (5820K for Haswell-E, 6850K I think for Broadwell-E) has 40 PCIe lanes. That’s from the CPU, vs Ryzen’s 24 PCIe lanes from the CPU. AFAIK they didn’t up that* for Zen 2 either (tis why I think the 3950X is a funky CPU, since it has the core count of HEDT but not the expandability).
*Apparently it gets extra funky with PCIe 4.0, there’s the ability to split it down to double the lanes but as PCIe 3.0? Or something like that.
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Oh, yeah of course. Didn’t mention because I thought that was common knowledge but yes, it is x16 or two full size slots as x8.
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Ok, so from what I understand ryzen is not designed for the use case I would like to use it for, and if I ever need more than one expansion car (i.e. 10gb ethernet card and something more) I will need to switch platforms
on the other hand, x99 is not that much cheaper if chinese boards are excluded, is almost dead platform with many security vulnerabilities (and updates for it may further degrade performance) and most likely will cost more in electricity bills in the long run
so i could probably flip a coin, and choose platform that way
that said, x570 and ryzen 3000 would be ideal due to pcie 4.0, but i don’t think I could afford it
Don’t think that is strictly true, you can get x8 x4 x4 on Ryzen 2nd gen and still get everything you want. If not look at x399, appreciate it is a “dead” platform but some awesome deals
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I guess you are talking about specific boards then? I couldn’t get that to work on my X470 Taichi Ultimate.
If you’re looking for 10Gb on X470, theres a board from Asrock RACK thats x470 with 10G lan, 2 M.2s and a couple of pcie slots.
I think its called X470D4U-2T.
Yeah that exists but honestly, the only thing it has over the normal boards is the IPMI. The Taichi Ultimate has a 10Gbit NIC and probably less issues because it gets almost the same UEFI as the regular Taichi.
Also: fuck me, is that board really 500,- bucks? Ouch!
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All depends on what the OP needs i guess.
You could eventually also consider a gen 1 threadripper cpu.
The 1920X 12 core 24T is pretty cheap atm.
And the x399 platform basically provides you all the pci-e gen3 lanes you need.
Of course x399 is an eol platform.
But still there are upgrade path’s there with TR 2000 cpu’s.
Only major downside of the threadripper 1000 series cpu´s,
is that they are lacking performance in things like gaming.
But if gaming isn´t really a concern, for productiviy they are still decent.
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Just double checked as I was doubting myself and the crosshair VII x470 supports x8 x4 x4 although the final x4 comes off the chipset. You are right though it is not a common feature on these boards. All depends where the OEM puts the m.2 connectors. Not a cheap board though.
Can’t believe I just spent 20 mins checking out pcie slot configs on a set of boards I have no intention of buying… I need help 
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