Supermicro Micro ATX DDR3 1333 Motherboard and CPU Combo A1SAM-2750F-O

However, to avoid any pain for anyone else out there trying to upgrade this thing to 64GB, it won't recognize the format unless you upgrade to the latest BIOS version from Supermicro. It took a lot of stress and wasted time to figure this out, so hopefully this review will save someone else from the issue.

* Update 2: Reducing my review to one star because these things are a ticking time bomb. Google "C2000 LPC clock issue". They will die after a year or two of run time. I still love SuperMicro, though. This is Intel's fault.* Update: I had previous issues getting it to boot ESXi, which were my own stupid fault. I have added a star and new information below.Solid and powerful enough for most tasks, but it does have some caveats you should be aware of:1. Upping it to 64GB RAM is nearly impossible. Only one manufacturer ON EARTH makes makes Unbuffered RAM in this density, and they charge accordingly. Doing this is well out of the reach of mere mortals like me, and I'm already the type that spends thousands of dollars on home server gear.2. It runs ESXi and Proxmox very well, but ESXi will fail to boot if you deviate too far from the stock BIOS config. This threw me off, since my first order of business in most cases is to tune the BIOS settings to my liking. YMMV.3. Although the board is server-class, it is still an older Atom chip. There is a very noticeable computational latency for many operations, even for running a desktop. I was running a jump box on it (a paired-down Windows VM), doing light work such as RDP, WebEx, and VoIP, and it lagged pretty hard. Moved the VM over to my Haswell host and it started performing snappily again. This thing is better suited for non-real-time applications like file, web, and database work. Do not count on it for things like VDI or on-the-fly media transcoding.

Our business got introduced to this little monster by our SuperMicro vendor, when we were looking into adding more storage nodes into our private cloud. You can be surprised to what the 8 core ATOM can do combined with the decent hard drive controller. Besides, this little beast can support up to 64GB of ram, which is awesome for the storage.I used this for my home FreeNAS box. Very fast, does not produce a lot of heat and as a result, can withstand harsher environment.