Thanks to no high-power components, besides the CPU, this board is fully compatible with desktop/tower cases as well as ANY cheap/simple rack chassis.

The absence of a HOT 10GbE chip is a FEATURE. Not a bug. Install an SP3 Noctua, and there ya go!

There are 3 x16 slots for suitable NICs, HBAs or x4 NVMe carriers. All of these are full-height/half-length cards. If someone needs spiining rust, there are 16 native SATA ports for some ZFS goodness.

Lastly, the bottom slot is full x16 PCIe gen4, so even a monster GPU can be supported in most cases.

If I were the designer of this board, I would have swap the placement of the M.2 with the DIMM/CPU

That at least would render the PCIE slots usable….

You can’t use any card that have bigger size than x16 slot, wuick reminder, that almost any raid controller have cables that going not to the top, but to the side.

You wanna install something like perc h755? Hah, shame on you you only have 1(!) port to do it, otherwise you will by on top of memory dimms.

And this spaces between pcie slots is more for GPU (since they are twoslot width), but nope, can’t use it for it.

So I guess it’s just HBA retimers card, but they ALSO bigger, than x16 slot. So the cables from them will go into cpu heatsink, yikes.

I just don’t understand why gigabyte continues to do this..