ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI Intel LGA1700 ATX workstation motherboard,2x PCIe 5.0x16 slot,DDR5,ECC memory,2x2.5 Gb Lan,3xM.2 slots,SlimSAS,BMC header,THUNDERBOLT4 Header,IPMI Expansion card bundled,ACCE

The CPU socket on the first board I received had bent pins so it was unusable and I sent it back. It looks like I'm not the only once to have experienced this. The second board was fully functional. What I love about this board is that you can switch off the IPMI, Aspeed onboard video and IP functions by simply flicking switches on the motherboard. In the meantime you have a workstation motherboard with high quality components and rock solid stability that supports ECC RAM and all this wrapped up in an mATX format. In other words this motherboard can be the foundation of a very powerful computer in a small package that should turn out to be highly reliable. One of the great things about reading motherboard reviews is that you realize that some reviewers simply don't know what they're talking about or they're not as experienced as they think they are. Read the reviews carefully then and make a decision. This board isn't cheap but if you know what you are doing it's well worth it.

I decided to order this board even though the only reviews that were listed were negative (mine arrived with NO bent pins). I paired it with ECC Ram - Kingston's KSM48E40BS8KM-16HM (2 sticks for 32GB) and an Intel 12600K - lowest/cheapest proc that supports ECC - be sure to check and see if your CPU support ECC before you order - not all do and may cause problems I would imagine. I also decided to run Debian 12 on it instead of Windows (Linux is not listed as a supported OS on ASUS's website). I have been using it for a couple weeks now and everything is working great. Here are a few caveats with this board that I have encountered: BMC remote management works great with Windows. However, I am running Debian and it works but remote control is a bit slow. However, the other features work fine (remote media, power control, etc). You can even flash the BIOS right from the BMC. Awesome! One thing to note with Linux - Do not have a monitor plugged into the server at the same time you are trying to use the Remote Control. The remote control ends up as a second screen and not the primary. This drove me crazy for a bit until I figured out what was going on. Run the server headless and you are ok. There may be a way around this but I haven't found it yet. The SlimSAS-SAS port does NOT support SAS disks unfortunately. I tried a slim SAS to SAS cable and it does not work. SlimSAS to SATA works fine though using the same cable. If you need SAS disk support, you will need a SAS controller card in one of the PCI Express slots. Debian OS - Have to set static ip address. For some reason when using DHCP it will not get an ip address unless you manually click connect in the dialog box (if you are using a GUI and KDE - maybe it will work if you just run without the GUI?? havent tested, need the GUI for my specific use case). 2.5Gbps networking works great. All other items were detected and work perfect - USB, etc. Overall I am happy with this board. Has some unique features that arent in too many boards such as ECC and the BMC. Also being able to use quick sync with the 12600K.

I have this board doing my server duties. I updated BIOS to prevent any issues with 13th generation Intel CPU. Nig plus, it supports ECC memory. It seems to have enough expansion slots, however after adding 10Gbe card, Nvidia GPU and LSi HBA card I'm left with only one more slot. The top two slots support PCIe Gen 4 and only one of them utilizes more PCIe lanes. I may use it to install Asus NVME expansion card. Beware, that this motherboard chip will only allow 2 more additional NVME drives. I could not get SlimSAS connector to work initially. However, after poking in the BIOS I was able to find option that enabled SlimSAS. This option is not in Bios Storage setup. I believe, SlimSAS can be passthrough to VM. I have a tiny complain. Why there are only 4 SATA ports? Not enough.

A good portion of this motherboard is frustrating. 1. BIOS Updates: The recommendation from the product support page claims that you should update Intel ME before updating the BIOS. Fun fact, you can only do that from within a Windows OS. This is a server motherboard and should not have that limitation as something close to >90% of servers are running a flavor of Linux. This means you need to standup a special VM just to update the BIOS on this machine. 2. ASUS Control Center Express does not work with this motherboard. One of the perks of a server board is the BMC/IPMI functions so you don't need to be sitting in front of the box with a monitor and keyboard to use it. The advertising for this product claim that you can make that functionality even better by using a product that they provide a license for along with the purchase. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with the BMC/IPMI on this motherboard. Screenshots provided as evidence that nothing is populated in the dashboard and it throws an error when attempting to use the various functions. 3. SlimSAS Port doesn't come with a cable. For a motherboard of this price, you should include small things like that, in my opinion. 4. Customer Service is atrocious. I registered the product and reached out to customer service after spending a week of doing my own troubleshooting with the previous issues. Not only was the initial customer service representative not able to help, they "escalated" me to another person who didn't respond for TWO WEEKS! That is unacceptable customer service for a board of this price. Who knows how long it'll be before they respond again. I'm not returning the motherboard because the hassle of taking all my services down and migrating them again is greater than the cost of keeping it, but I'm very disappointed overall. I expect better from server quality components and from ASUS as a whole.

I recently used this motherboard to build a workstation. I read the online manuals for this motherboard before purchasing it. One thing that I found extremely misleading is that the online ASUS support site for this specific motherboard includes a RAID manual that discusses options for configuring RAID using the CPU and/or the PCH/chipset. However, this RAID manual is apparently a generic manual and BEWARE that not all features described in this RAID manual necessarily apply to the motherboard you're looking at. So for this motherboard for instance, it does not support VROC (CPU RAID) at all. I didn't learn this until I had actually made the purchase and was trying to configure the system to have a VROC array. It is not possible. Further, the spacing of the two PCI-e gen 5 x16 slots will not enable you to install anything larger than a two-slot card in the first of these if you also want to install something in the second PCIe x16 gen5 slot. In other words, they're spaced two-slots away form each other. This is problematic for the scenario where you want to install two things and one of those takes three slots which many GPUs do. Also this doesn't support XMP profiles - or at least I can't find them. It doesn't come with the graphical BIOS, but only the old-school text-mode BIOS, and that BIOS' Tweaker page doesn't include any XMP settings. You *can* adjust the MT/s speed for your memory, and there are TONS of manual settings for adjusting RAM latencies, but it would be much better if it could just use the XMP profile built into the DRAM itself rather than hoping you guess right on all of these various latency values (there are WAY more than 4 of them so it'd be very easy to guess them wrong). I just changed the speed alone and left the rest of the values as-is. Another thing that really bums me out about this motherboard is that it doesn't have any Thunderbolt port. You have to buy an expansion card if you want Thunderbolt. And for a workstation-class motherboard it's also a letdown that it doesn't have a 10Gbps NIC. Also - there's no built-in WiFi. And there are NO PCIe gen 5 M.2 ports. When it says it has "Thundergbolt 4 header support" that just means you have to buy an extra PCIe card and attach the header to that card using a cable. It does NOT include any TPM card so you have to purchase that separately if you want to install an OS like Windows. I used this TPM card successfully with this motherboard: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CK1DQFZ5

This is a heavily compromised board in my opinion. I bought this for my hobby homelab, which has grown in responsibilities over the years and has reached its peak at this motherboard with a 13700k. It's been stable-ish for about 7 months, but more recently I've been pushing it too hard and getting kernel panics and hard lockups. I don't blame the board entirely, the faults come down to the available PCIE lanes of consumer desktop processors. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR before buying this board: count how many PCIE lanes you intend to use. Remember that Intel's 14900k has only 20 PCIE lanes available (x16 Gen 5 and x4 Gen 4). This SEVERELY limits the bandwidth for devices you can use. I'm successfully running: - 1 NVIDIA 3060 - 4 NVME Samsung 990 Pros (1 via the IPMI 3.0 x1 slot) - 6 SATA 870 EVO ssds - 12 SATA 16TB Exos hdds via an LSI HBA I think I'm already consuming way more than 20 lanes, so the motherboard is doing some bandwidth magic to keep this thing afloat. I've added a 2nd NVIDIA 3060 into the other x16 slot (now both GPUs are running at x8 speed, theoretically fine) and have run into twice weekly crashes usually when the system is fully loaded. I suspect any slowdowns are due to this bandwidth limitation. What I should have done 7 months ago is upgraded platforms to AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon, which have 64-128 PCIE lanes available for all my nonsense. This is 90% my fault for not doing my research, but I do blame the marketing around this board, they don't make it very clear that filling every slot on this board necessitates extremely slow speeds or complete crashes. Otherwise, the ECC RAM is expensive but it works (shows up in memtest). The SlimSAS port never worked for me, the drives connected never showed up in the bios nor the OS so I gave up on it. POST code display is neat. I tried IPMI briefly but ditched it for another NVME, kinda lame it's a separate card and not built into the board (like the marketing suggests).

I use it in a server with TreNAS Scale. Everything works so far. You need to update Intel drivers and bios following specific instructions, so it was a hiccup, but feasible. I just put everything in a usb drive. In the drive I had already put windows pe with Rufus. So I completed this operation without installing windows as is. I just ran windows pe from the drive. Once this part is done, everything else worked fine.

I picked up this board specifically to build a home server from it, choosing a lower idle power CPU to pair with ECC DDR5 memory. Solid well constructed board with a complete feature set and sample of options in the BIOS to tweak out a cool running home server. 4 x16 wide PCIe (electrical 8x, 8x, 4x, 4x) has plenty of NVME options, SAS and SATA connections for running high drive count. Aux power to give extra juice to the PCIe slots is a bonus. Very pleased.