The Z9N-OC motherboard is a No Frills but no nonsense workstation board that makes a lot of sense for those who want to build a machine based around a Zeon CPU and error correcting memory. If you have multiple PCI Express peripherals, it might seem like a good idea to use the x16 slot for additional storage or connectivity options. However, if you have that many PCI Express peripherals, you're not really going to want to do that on a platform that only has 16 PCI Express lengths to begin with. Instead, running an x99 chipset would be a better option.

The motherboard also features air correcting memory, which means that it can use error correcting memory at relatively low cost. This makes it a perfectly excellent FreeNAS box because you can run error correcting memory and still have access to very fast caching options through BME storage. You can use the SATA 6 connections for six physical hard drives, and the x16 slot for 10 Gbit Ethernet or something else. Alternatively, you could use the x16 slot for additional SATA hard drive connectivity or whatever.

One of the unique features of this motherboard is its simplified layout, which reduces the number of components on the board. This makes it a great option for those who want to build a simple workstation without having to figure out complex configurations. The use of azrock super alloy components ensures that the board is built for durability and reliability.

The motherboard is not designed to be used with integrated video, mainly due to the particular CPUs it's designed to work with, namely Zeon CPUs. There are some Zeon CPUs that integrate built-in video, but in previous generations, Intel would support only VGA for example on some Zeon parts, leading to confusion and weirdness among motherboard manufacturers.

However, this motherboard does have one USB 3.0 header for front panel USB 3.0 connections, which is a convenient feature for those who want to use high-speed storage or peripherals. In terms of software support, the Linux support for this board seems to be very good, with both Red Hat Enterprise Server and Centos working basically out of the box.

The motherboard is also certified for Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows 8, as well as Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, and on up. This makes it a great option for those who want to build a workstation with a Zeon CPU and run a Windows Server operating system.

Overall, I really like the Z9N-OC motherboard. The graphics card is always by6 regardless of which other slot it's in, which helps keep costs down. The use of a simplified layout makes it easy to configure and reduces the number of components on the board. The azrock super alloy components ensure that the board is built for durability and reliability.

I also appreciate the "less is more" approach of this motherboard, which uses a straightforward configuration without any unnecessary options or bells and whistles. This makes it a great option for those who want to build a simple workstation without having to figure out complex configurations. The fact that you can use error correcting memory at relatively low cost and still have access to very fast caching options through BME storage is also a big plus.

If you've got one of these motherboards and some information to share with the rest of the group, please head on over to the forums at Tech Sydicate.com. I'm Wendell, signing off and looking forward to seeing you there!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enASRock workstation boards the E3 V5 WS it looked interesting to me so I thought I would take a look the c232 chipset is really about server workloads and the server platform it doesn't really have as many features as the z170 chipset it's a much more minimal configuration and we'll see that when we take a look at the board so let's go through the board the features on the board real quick at the top edge of the board we've got the 8 Pin CPU power connector and we've got the four pin fan header for the CPU fan and just below that we've got the CPU socket of course the CPU that you want to be using is the Intel E3 V5 1200 series CPUs basically you want to be using a Zeon CPU with this motherboard especially in order to be able to get features like airror correcting memory which is the real reason that you have the c232 chipset and the motherboard does of course have four ddr4 Ram slots at the back panel we have two PS2 connections one for PS2 keyboard one for PS2 Mouse we have our four usb3 ports then we've got our uh onboard ethernet this is an Intel gigabit Nick then we've got our Ela audio this is just a 7.1 audio solution and that's pretty much it that's pretty much everything that's back here most of the other connections are along the bottom edge of the board this is where the HD audio is the TPM header we've got two USB 2.0 headers we've got our six SATA 6 connections our front panel connection the clear seos jumper and then we've got two more four pin fan headers now looking at the PCI Express layout it's kind of interesting they there are three pcie by one and 2 by 16 now on other motherboards like a z170 motherboard the two by 16 slots would be split between the CPU so the CPUs in this particular family have 16 PCI Express Lanes and then they have something else a DMI 3.0 connection that is like equivalent to four lanes of PCI Express connectivity but you can run you know sort of it can do multiplexing almost sort of kind of so you can run multiple peripherals over that PCI Express by for connection but things that are not using the PCI Express bus that's wired directly into the CPU will be limited to that total amount of bandwidth that's available which is about four PCI Express 3.0 Lanes worth of bandwidth so what does that mean it's like well this particular motherboard doesn't actually split the PCI Express Lanes that are wired directly into the CPU between these two slots that means that if you run a graphics card in the top slot here it is always wired at 16 regardless of whatever is wired into PCI E4 but that does mean the PCI E4 can only run at 4X so if you were going to try to run you know uh multiple video cards your only option on this motherboard would be Crossfire but that's not what this motherboard is built for this motherboard is built to be you know multimedia content creation workstation motherboard that is sort of lowc cost and commodity and so that's what we were taking a look at this motherboard for for you know editor type jobs and things like that because this kind of a job is going to have you know SSD boot drive it's going to have access to a lot of storage it's going to need you know a pretty good network connection uh it's only going to have one graphics card and so what is the other PCI Express slot wired in well it's that buy4 slot is connected through the DMI bus which means that that slot also supports nvme storage so we would be able to use our Intel nvme and boot from it in that secondary you know physical by6 slot we can also run a RAID controller or something like that off of that other slot but it keeps our graphics card at by6 now other motherboards if you wanted to do that you're going to be splitting your PCI Express Lanes eight lanes for the uh graphics card and eight lanes for something else if you were going to run a lot of PCI Express peripherals from a Skylake machine then yeah maybe that would make sense you would have eight lanes for your graphics card eight lanes for something else and then you would have you know your buy4 video capture card maybe you use buy eight for your video capture card and then one of the pcie by4 DMI captures but also absent from this motherboard is m.2 so normally m.2 shows up as a PCI Express by4 connection not on this motherboard if you want to use m.2 with this motherboard you would need to use an m.2 adapter in that second physical by6 slot in order to be able to run that I don't really see that as a downside in this particular motherboard I just think it's something to call attention to so that you know exactly what you're getting this actually could be really useful if you were actually looking for this particular config configuration because you had something in mind that you wanted to build but this is actually a good thing that the PCI Express situation on this motherboard is configured the way that it is depending on what your particular build requirements are now if you were going to run say an nvme boot drive and a PCI Express video capture card well you're out of PCI Express Lan so you're not going to be able to do that the reality is that if you have that many PCI Express peripherals though you're not really going to want to do that on a platform that really only has 16 PCI Express lengths to begin with you're going to want to run x99 you're not going to really be able to do that on the sky like side of things but being able to run the Zeon and the c232 chipset also means that you get air correcting memory so if you wanted to combine this this would make a perfectly excellent freeas box because you could run error correcting memory relatively low cost but with a modern powerful xon CPU and with modern very fast uh PCI Express memory you can use in BME storage for caching and then you can use your six SATA 6 connections for six physical hard drives then you could use your x16 slot for 10 gbit Ethernet or something else hell you could use the uh the x16 slot for additional SATA hard drive connectivity or whatever and still be able to use your nvme storage for lightning fast caching if you wanted to run that kind of a configuration if you are running this as a small business server or a Linux box server or something like that this PCI Express configure ation is sort of No Frills but no nonsense and it makes a lot of sense for those kinds of configurations also even though I mentioned that this motherboard is compatible with the I3 I5 i7 notice what's missing from the back plane integrated video this motherboard is not designed to be used with integrated video mainly owing to the particular CPUs this is designed to be used with namely the Zeon CPUs and there are some Zeon CPUs that integrate uh built-in video with them although in past Generations it was a little bit of a debacle because Intel would would say support only VGA for example on some Zeon parts and it led to a lot of confusion and weirdness a lot of motherboard manufacturers um for higher end server motherboards will actually put on ipmi controllers which have their own VGA controller ipmi is of course the remote uh management platform Remote Management interface that you might see on a Server Motherboard so this is meant for you know small business workstation use maybe small business Server doesn't have a ton of of remote access features does not have ipmi or anything like that but nonetheless is a No Frills No Nonsense board that makes a perfectly reasonable basis for a machine that you might want to build using a Zeon CPU as a basis this motherboard also does have one USB 3.0 header for front panel USB 3.0 connections now in terms of software support the Linux support for this board seems to be very good I tried both Red Hat Enterprise server Centos um and also Susa everything seemed to work basically out of the box I really didn't do extensive testing I did not try to do fan control or or fan speed mon monitoring or anything like that but I did make sure that the CPU didn't overheat and the weird stuff didn't happen because sometimes weird stuff can happen basically everything worked as advertised as far as I could tell in addition to being certified for Windows 10 Windows 7 and Windows 8 this motherboard is also certified for Windows Server 2012 2012 R2 and on up so if you want to get a Zeon and you want to run a Windows Server operating system with this motherboard that will be no problem whatsoever so what do I think after using this motherboard for a little while I really like it I like the fact that the graphics card is always by6 regardless the other by6 slot the second by6 slot runs a 4X through the DMI interface that helps lower the cost of materials for the board you know no frills No Nonsense they don't really have to figure a lot out if you look at the layout of the motherboard you can tell that it's a simplified layout reduced number of components that kind of thing you know but still uses azrock super alloy components it seems to be built for durability and reliability time will tell if it measures up but I do like the less is more approach of this instead of trying to figure out you know a thing to go between by 8 by 8 or by 16 and you know by zero this motherboard is always by 16 and the second slots Always by four that's really its best feature it's a simple noons workstation board that makes a lot of sense if you're going to be doing you know video production good all-around machine and especially is a good choice if you're going to build a machine based around a Zeon CPU and error correcting memory overall I like it but if you've got one of these and you have some information and you want to share with the rest of the group then please do head on over to the forums at Tech syndicate.com I'm Wendell I'm signing out and I'll see you thereASRock workstation boards the E3 V5 WS it looked interesting to me so I thought I would take a look the c232 chipset is really about server workloads and the server platform it doesn't really have as many features as the z170 chipset it's a much more minimal configuration and we'll see that when we take a look at the board so let's go through the board the features on the board real quick at the top edge of the board we've got the 8 Pin CPU power connector and we've got the four pin fan header for the CPU fan and just below that we've got the CPU socket of course the CPU that you want to be using is the Intel E3 V5 1200 series CPUs basically you want to be using a Zeon CPU with this motherboard especially in order to be able to get features like airror correcting memory which is the real reason that you have the c232 chipset and the motherboard does of course have four ddr4 Ram slots at the back panel we have two PS2 connections one for PS2 keyboard one for PS2 Mouse we have our four usb3 ports then we've got our uh onboard ethernet this is an Intel gigabit Nick then we've got our Ela audio this is just a 7.1 audio solution and that's pretty much it that's pretty much everything that's back here most of the other connections are along the bottom edge of the board this is where the HD audio is the TPM header we've got two USB 2.0 headers we've got our six SATA 6 connections our front panel connection the clear seos jumper and then we've got two more four pin fan headers now looking at the PCI Express layout it's kind of interesting they there are three pcie by one and 2 by 16 now on other motherboards like a z170 motherboard the two by 16 slots would be split between the CPU so the CPUs in this particular family have 16 PCI Express Lanes and then they have something else a DMI 3.0 connection that is like equivalent to four lanes of PCI Express connectivity but you can run you know sort of it can do multiplexing almost sort of kind of so you can run multiple peripherals over that PCI Express by for connection but things that are not using the PCI Express bus that's wired directly into the CPU will be limited to that total amount of bandwidth that's available which is about four PCI Express 3.0 Lanes worth of bandwidth so what does that mean it's like well this particular motherboard doesn't actually split the PCI Express Lanes that are wired directly into the CPU between these two slots that means that if you run a graphics card in the top slot here it is always wired at 16 regardless of whatever is wired into PCI E4 but that does mean the PCI E4 can only run at 4X so if you were going to try to run you know uh multiple video cards your only option on this motherboard would be Crossfire but that's not what this motherboard is built for this motherboard is built to be you know multimedia content creation workstation motherboard that is sort of lowc cost and commodity and so that's what we were taking a look at this motherboard for for you know editor type jobs and things like that because this kind of a job is going to have you know SSD boot drive it's going to have access to a lot of storage it's going to need you know a pretty good network connection uh it's only going to have one graphics card and so what is the other PCI Express slot wired in well it's that buy4 slot is connected through the DMI bus which means that that slot also supports nvme storage so we would be able to use our Intel nvme and boot from it in that secondary you know physical by6 slot we can also run a RAID controller or something like that off of that other slot but it keeps our graphics card at by6 now other motherboards if you wanted to do that you're going to be splitting your PCI Express Lanes eight lanes for the uh graphics card and eight lanes for something else if you were going to run a lot of PCI Express peripherals from a Skylake machine then yeah maybe that would make sense you would have eight lanes for your graphics card eight lanes for something else and then you would have you know your buy4 video capture card maybe you use buy eight for your video capture card and then one of the pcie by4 DMI captures but also absent from this motherboard is m.2 so normally m.2 shows up as a PCI Express by4 connection not on this motherboard if you want to use m.2 with this motherboard you would need to use an m.2 adapter in that second physical by6 slot in order to be able to run that I don't really see that as a downside in this particular motherboard I just think it's something to call attention to so that you know exactly what you're getting this actually could be really useful if you were actually looking for this particular config configuration because you had something in mind that you wanted to build but this is actually a good thing that the PCI Express situation on this motherboard is configured the way that it is depending on what your particular build requirements are now if you were going to run say an nvme boot drive and a PCI Express video capture card well you're out of PCI Express Lan so you're not going to be able to do that the reality is that if you have that many PCI Express peripherals though you're not really going to want to do that on a platform that really only has 16 PCI Express lengths to begin with you're going to want to run x99 you're not going to really be able to do that on the sky like side of things but being able to run the Zeon and the c232 chipset also means that you get air correcting memory so if you wanted to combine this this would make a perfectly excellent freeas box because you could run error correcting memory relatively low cost but with a modern powerful xon CPU and with modern very fast uh PCI Express memory you can use in BME storage for caching and then you can use your six SATA 6 connections for six physical hard drives then you could use your x16 slot for 10 gbit Ethernet or something else hell you could use the uh the x16 slot for additional SATA hard drive connectivity or whatever and still be able to use your nvme storage for lightning fast caching if you wanted to run that kind of a configuration if you are running this as a small business server or a Linux box server or something like that this PCI Express configure ation is sort of No Frills but no nonsense and it makes a lot of sense for those kinds of configurations also even though I mentioned that this motherboard is compatible with the I3 I5 i7 notice what's missing from the back plane integrated video this motherboard is not designed to be used with integrated video mainly owing to the particular CPUs this is designed to be used with namely the Zeon CPUs and there are some Zeon CPUs that integrate uh built-in video with them although in past Generations it was a little bit of a debacle because Intel would would say support only VGA for example on some Zeon parts and it led to a lot of confusion and weirdness a lot of motherboard manufacturers um for higher end server motherboards will actually put on ipmi controllers which have their own VGA controller ipmi is of course the remote uh management platform Remote Management interface that you might see on a Server Motherboard so this is meant for you know small business workstation use maybe small business Server doesn't have a ton of of remote access features does not have ipmi or anything like that but nonetheless is a No Frills No Nonsense board that makes a perfectly reasonable basis for a machine that you might want to build using a Zeon CPU as a basis this motherboard also does have one USB 3.0 header for front panel USB 3.0 connections now in terms of software support the Linux support for this board seems to be very good I tried both Red Hat Enterprise server Centos um and also Susa everything seemed to work basically out of the box I really didn't do extensive testing I did not try to do fan control or or fan speed mon monitoring or anything like that but I did make sure that the CPU didn't overheat and the weird stuff didn't happen because sometimes weird stuff can happen basically everything worked as advertised as far as I could tell in addition to being certified for Windows 10 Windows 7 and Windows 8 this motherboard is also certified for Windows Server 2012 2012 R2 and on up so if you want to get a Zeon and you want to run a Windows Server operating system with this motherboard that will be no problem whatsoever so what do I think after using this motherboard for a little while I really like it I like the fact that the graphics card is always by6 regardless the other by6 slot the second by6 slot runs a 4X through the DMI interface that helps lower the cost of materials for the board you know no frills No Nonsense they don't really have to figure a lot out if you look at the layout of the motherboard you can tell that it's a simplified layout reduced number of components that kind of thing you know but still uses azrock super alloy components it seems to be built for durability and reliability time will tell if it measures up but I do like the less is more approach of this instead of trying to figure out you know a thing to go between by 8 by 8 or by 16 and you know by zero this motherboard is always by 16 and the second slots Always by four that's really its best feature it's a simple noons workstation board that makes a lot of sense if you're going to be doing you know video production good all-around machine and especially is a good choice if you're going to build a machine based around a Zeon CPU and error correcting memory overall I like it but if you've got one of these and you have some information and you want to share with the rest of the group then please do head on over to the forums at Tech syndicate.com I'm Wendell I'm signing out and I'll see you there\n"