My home server's motherboard recently bit the dust (Z68 chipset), and I was in search of something to replace it. Anyone who is familiar with tech knows that prices drop exponentially as it is replaced by new tech. What you forget is that it's an inverted bell curve. Towards the three or four year mark, as parts become more scarce, and prices go up exponentially. These parts are no longer being manufactured, but are still in use in many homes. So both new and old parts are scarce.
I searched for a long time to find a board with similar capabilities to the Z68 that didn't cost more than a brand new current generation Z170 board. It's a little ridiculous to see four year old boards going for $200+. Supply and demand in action, folks. I was super happy to have found this board on Amazon, and reasonably priced too! This board doesn't have a ton of features, as the B75 chipset was designed more for office use.
As this was for use in a home server, the number of SATA ports was important to me. And this board comes with a whopping 6 ports, which is fantastic! Only one of the ports is SATA3, which you probably want to reserve for the OS. The other ports are all SATA2, but for a server access speed is probably bottlenecked by your network anyway.
One oddity is that I was unable to change my memory speed. I run this with a i2500 (non-K, locked) CPU, so I'm not sure if it is because the motherboard is incapable of changing memory speeds with a locked CPU. I've been building PCs for two decades, so either the BIOS interface is poorly designed in such a way that makes this hard to do, or this is simply not possible with the B75 chipset. My previous Z68 chipset allowed my to scale RAM speeds independently of the CPU.
| Processor | core_i7 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 32 GB DDR3 |
| Memory Speed | 1333 MHz |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 4 |
