ASUS WS C422 PRO/SE LGA2066 ECC DDR4 M.2 U.2 ATX Motherboard for Intel Xeon W-Series Processors with SafeSlot

Update: My WS C422 Pro/SE Motherboard is now working perfectly. The fan control issue I have encountered with the motherboard was solved last December 2018 by updating the BIOS and ASMB9 Firmware (November 20, 2018 BIOS release and November 11, 2018 ASMB9-iKVM Firmware release). After the update, the fan control icon appeared in the iKVM Settings. That's better than Q-Fan control I guess. All the features I need including the SR-IOV control is already in there so everything is fine now. This the best motherboard I've ever had. Tons of features, looks great, and durable. I use this board as a Hyper-V Server and works very smoothly and I am planning to attach GTX Cards to some Virtual Machines. I love this motherboard so I change the rating to 5 stars. Thanks to ASUS Technical Support Team and Engineering Team!Old review: I got very angry when I found out that there's no Fan Controls. No Fan Control in the BIOS, No Fan Control in the ASMB9-iKVM. I contacted ASUS Support and all they have said is "We've escalated your issue to the Technical Support Team and we are still waiting for the feedback" and until now no update. I am an ASUS loyalist because I trust their products (all PC I built are based on ASUS Motherboards). but now I see that ASUS is becoming sloppy, specially in technical support. I like the motherboard though, it looks great and durable. ASUS please make an update for the BIOS and add the Q-FAN feature. I will make my rating 5 stars if the Q-Fan feature and SR-IOV Control has been added in the next BIOS update.

First of many poorly handled griefs, the vendor, VPCI, sent me a defective motherboard. When it finally did arrive, the board continued crashing and it was even more apparent if it even managed to post or boot to BIOS.The bigger issue, was that even after reaching out to let them know of their defective board, they informed me they “couldn’t do anything about it” and that I should “reach out to the manufacturer”. The common response when your company has 0 idea what is going on.What aggravated me more than anything, was the simple fact after everything I detailed above; When I finally got in contact with the manufacturer, I needed to have the invoice from the order. It needed to be resent because Amazon does not display orders beyond 3 months of purchase, so upon reaching out to the seller a second time to have the invoice resent, they stated they “don’t do that” and stopped responding entirely.This poor excuse of a vendor should not be purchased from, as enticing as they may seem given their products are listed on the Amazon marketplace. I can assure you, anything you are in search for, instead of purchasing from this vendor, cut out this weak middleman and do exactly as they advised me to do and “go directly to the manufacturer.”

I purchased this board to pair with a Xeon W and some ECC memory. The install and initial setup was as typical as any other board with a few gotchas:1) This board DOES have fan control but it's not in the BIOS. It's IPMI/BMC controlled. I believe it was made available in the latest IPMI/BMC firmware (ASUS website). Once you're logged into the IPMI web page it's under Settings -> Fan Control. HOWEVER, the "Fan Control" button does NOT show up in Chrome. It does in Edge. In there you can set fan curves for the various fans.2) Cold booting takes some time - especially after having no power/first boot. These newer boards also do memory training and I believe my board had a BIOS update loaded at the factory that was pending as it said it was updating the BIOS. On first boot the machine powered itself on/off three or four times before finally showing the POST screen.3) I took one star off for "Easy to use" because this *is* a workstation board. You'll need to be comfortable with an IPMI/BMC controller and how to set its IP and access it. The IPMI is shared with the LAN1 port.What I like:========= - The M.2 heat spreaders are quite nice with thermal pads. Although the board supports 22110 drives, I don't believe you'll be able to use the heat spreader since most 22110 SSDs have power failure protection capacitors that rise above the NAND chips. Any typical 2280 SSDs though work fine. My Samsung 950 Pro fit perfectly. - The VRMs seem to run quite cool.What I would change:================= - Fix the IPMI browser incompatibility. In addition to the fan control missing I was also unable to set any of the fan thresholds in the alerts/sensor section from Chrome. - There is only one internal USB 2.0 header - which is used by the front panel (in my case). I have a Corsair H115i that connects via USB header so there is no place to connect it. - The SATA cables that come with it are throwaways (no latches). I'd also like to see at least one right-angled cable.

I replaced a similar Gigabyte board with this ASUS WS C422. This is a much better board overall (but no PLX chip) (and the BIOS is functional! ... unlike the GB board)I'm using it as a ML/AI compute platform with a Titan V, 128GB mem, NVMe storage and a Xeon-W 2175. Very nice setup. The board has all the nice "Workstation" features you expect from any of the ASUS WS boards. I'm running mostly Linux Ubuntu 18.04 (which installed easily)The only problem I have had with it is occasional hang on reboot (I dual boot Linux to Win 10 occasionally) It doesn't happen every time. I believe it is from the IPMI net probe from the BMC (which I have disabled) A quick power down and up takes care of it.Also, someone had asked about boot time... (I have 128 GB mem) In general from cold start to login is less than 90 sec. The same 90sec for rebooting from Linux to Win10. This is good in my experience for a workstation class system with 128GB mem!