I agree, the ROMED8-2T has everything I want and compromises almost nothing. One of the PCI Express slots is shared with one of the on-board M.2 slots, SATA, and Oculink, but even then, you get to choose: Run the slot at x16 and turn off M2/Sata/Oculink? Run the Slot in x8 and get M2/Sata but lose Oculink? Or disable the slot and get M2/Sata/Oculink? I think that's a great compromise (I run the slot at x8 and use it for a Fibre Channel card to my backup tape drive). Lovely block diagram in the manual as well.
Plenty of Fan headers as well, and using SFF-8643 connectors for the SATA ports makes so much sense (though it's an extra cost for the cables). They even put a power header if you run too many high-powered PCIe cards (since PCIe allows AFAIK to pull up to 75W from the slot).
They really put every feature that makes sense onto that board, and yeah, if you want Dual CPUs or 16 DIMM Slots, chances are that a proper vendor server is more what you want.
I can't think of anything that I don't like about the board. Well, I wish the built-in Ethernet ports weren't RJ45 but SFP+, but that's really the only thing I wish to change.
> I can't think of anything that I don't like about the board. Well, I wish the built-in Ethernet ports weren't RJ45 but SFP+, but that's really the only thing I wish to change.
YES. Jesus. The fact that the state of the art for SFP+ motherboards is basically still Denverton (C3758 etc) is embarrassing. You have all these "server" motherboards with consumer base-t standards... even if you have base-t to the workstations, surely your fancy SOHO/SMB setup will have a server closet where it would make sense to have SFP+ for the server, to punch down a bunch of individual base-T links... (and actually base-t has much more latency than SFP+ as well - measurable on NVMe drives etc)
In theory this is something that OCP 2.0 mezzanine cards (like MZ31-AR0 uses) can do for you. Actually these are quite cheap because of the very limited surplus market for them, and you can get adapter cards to put them in PCIe slots if you want (the adapter cards are unusual enough they're not cheap, but like most pcie adapter cards they're not inherently expensive or electrically difficult). So you can put SFP+ on anything you want with a OCP 2.0 slot - but of course most of the asrock rack, supermicro, etc are all base-t with no OCP 2.0. Infuriating.
(OCP 2.0 does make "traditional" IO area very difficult however, it eats a lot of space in that IO shield area, and this often has the side-effect that the CPU gets pushed over into the other side of the board where it starts overlapping pcie slots etc. There are reasons to not do it - and this is another problem brought on by the ATX layout. But then offer some SFP+ please - really SFP28 25gbit should be available at this point on things like the ROMED8 model imo.)
And before someone says Minisforum MS-01... no ECC (which could be forgiven) and the chinese vendors are unfortunately quite poor in the support department in general. They are great at marketing via influencers etc but I have read a number of people say they've run them long-term and were upset about the support story.
Which is a shame because on paper it's quite attractive - 12/13th gen are incredibly speedy (faster than AMD 7000 series) and most server workloads don't benefit that much from v-cache, a laptop CPU (again, ideally with ECC) with a couple SFP28 cards is more or less an ideal 25gb switch, can serve NVMe flash drives pretty fast, etc. It is quite desirable to have high per-thread performance in a homelab, especially when you are the sole user (4 people running 1 GB/s is not the same as 1 person running 4 GB/s). i3 7100 was actually an extremely interesting sku for this reason - 3.9 GHz dual-core (7350K is 4.2 GHz base, and 8350K/9350K were 4.2 GHz base 4C4T) is quite punchy, you never drop clocks due to AVX offset, and i3s supported ECC in this era. AM4 server boards weren't mature yet (X470D4U was one of the first good ones and it still took several years to stabilize fully) so the alternative was sandy bridge xeons etc, and the 7100 (while not a popular gaming CPU) absolutely destroyed that shit for homelab NAS builds, in both perf and efficiency.
Again, it's kind of a tragedy that C3758 is the norm still - that's 8x 14nm e-cores with RDIMM support and onboard Intel QAT (of whatever gen). That is not fast at all, we are talking like sub-zen1 performance here probably, with no AVX, etc.
(Unfortunately minisforum's AMD boards are not any better in the support department, and AMD segments ECC to the Pro laptop chips too, etc.)
I think in practice the problem is the length of the SFP+ cage - it's noticeably longer than base-t. And that means either you're wasting space on your base-t boards, or you have to design a custom layout for SFP+, which is already a (truthfully) small/niche market etc. It is understandable, just unfortunate.
Plenty of Fan headers as well, and using SFF-8643 connectors for the SATA ports makes so much sense (though it's an extra cost for the cables). They even put a power header if you run too many high-powered PCIe cards (since PCIe allows AFAIK to pull up to 75W from the slot).
They really put every feature that makes sense onto that board, and yeah, if you want Dual CPUs or 16 DIMM Slots, chances are that a proper vendor server is more what you want.
I can't think of anything that I don't like about the board. Well, I wish the built-in Ethernet ports weren't RJ45 but SFP+, but that's really the only thing I wish to change.