Having played a bit with these sub-100E Gigabyte boards, the IPMI is slow to boot but quite pleasant to work with. Of particular interest compared with Supermicro, Gigabyte lets you designate an ISO file from your own computer, load it as virtual device and even pass it to the BIOS as default boot option from a drop-down menu in the HTML5 remote console. A bit slow but very convenient.
After going deep through BIOS settings, I found an option to allow ECC error injection. MemTest86 Pro successfully ran on both the Ryzen MC12-EC0 and EPYC MJ11-EC1 while testing ECC.
MC12-EC0 just works as advertised. x16 and x4 slots from the CPU (nice!), only 6 SATA and one x1 M.2 slot from the PCH, which could do much more, so it doesn't make much use of its micro-ATX size. But hey! it was 55 E for the boxed motherboard with a 1U cooler (sufficient and quiet with a 65 W Ryzen 5350G PRO).
MJ11-EC1 is a pleasant surprise, within its limits. The stock CPU fan is awfully noisy, but can be easily unscrewed and replaced with a whisper-quiet Noctua NF-A6x25, which provides sufficient cooling. The SlimSAS 4i port only works as 4*SATA; neither cross-flashing a MJ11-EC0 BIOS nor playing with hidden variables of the native BIOS could switch it to NVMe. The 8i slot is the only option to add PCIe devices; using a 10GTek cable SFF-8654 8i to 2*SFF-8639, I could use one U.2 drive from it—the slot does NOT bifurcate.
If the i210 NIC is sufficient, this board and its 8 SATA ports looks like a perfect fit for small NAS builds in Fractal Design Node 304 or Jonsbo N1/N2/N3 cases. Slimline 4i to SATA breakout cables can be found on eBay for <20 E. But one needs a 3D printer to make an I/O shield.
If the 1 GbE NIC is a limitation, I've spotted some offers on eBay for (Datto-rebranded)
Gigabyte MB10-DS4 from 350E onwards:
Modell: M B10- D S1 O E M Format: mini I T X Anschlüsse extern: 2x Gbit L A N, I P M I, 2x U S B, V G A Anschlüsse intern: 6x S A T A, 4x D D R4 Reg E C C, 3x Fan 4pin, U S B3 Header Prozessor: Xeon D-1521 4 Core Zubehör: A T X Blende.
www.ebay.de
In Supermicro terms, these would be a cross between X10SDV-4C-TLN4F (same 2*10G + 2*1G NIC, D-1518) and X10SDV-TLN2F (same D-1521, loses the 2*i210 NIC). Given the poor supply of second-hand X10SDV boards in Europe, these Gigabyte MB10 could be an honest alternative.
A possible caveat is IPMI: I don't know what kind of IPMI is provided by the MB10. If it's the same HTML5 IPMI as the MC12 and MJ11, it's good but I did NOT like the Java-only (i.e. unusable from a Mac…) IPMI on a Datto-rebranded AsRockRack D1541D4U-2T8R, which belongs to the same Xeon D-1500 generation.
www.piospartslap.de
