Gigabyte MU70-SU0 (Intel C612) Server Motherboard Review

Bohs Hansen / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts & Pricing

Pricing

The Gigabyte MU70-SU0 might be a server motherboard that packs a lot of features, but it doesn’t cost as much as one might expect. You can find the board at NewEgg for $349.99, at ServerCase UK for £271.80, or find a good deal in Germany through Geizhals where it starts at €352.66 at the time of writing.

Overview

Gigabyte has a strong server lineup and the MU70-SUO surely deserves to be among them. You get a motherboard with great features, upgrade abilities; and best of all, you get it for a fair price.

There are a lot of connection options here. You get 8 normal SATA3 ports and one SATA3 DOM port that can deliver independent power without extra connections. There’s also an mSATA slot for extra storage drives as well as a type-A USB 3.0 onboard header for diagnostic, backup, or systems running from USB.

With two x16 Gen3 PCIe expansion slots and another x8 and x4, it allows you to upgrade with a lot of extra features, might they be FirePro or Quadro cards, NVMe storage drives, or extra controllers. There’s plenty of bandwidth for it all. The PCIe x4 mezzanine card slot allows you to add an optional LAN card with two 10GbE SFP+ ports directly to the motherboard.

While we don’t have anything to compare it with yet, the motherboard performed very well and produces some great results for both the memory and CPU tests. If you’re comparing these results to those from other people, make sure that they aren’t running a GPU on the system as that will have a big impact on the scores. Our results are purely from the motherboard alone.

You also get four GbE RJ45 LAN ports, all running on their own Intel 210i chip. The Aspeed AST2400 Controller allows you to remotely connect and manage the server, even when it isn’t powered on. A great feature for any administrator. You can check on voltages, fans, and health or update the BIOS and settings, it’s all possible. This is a pretty common feature on server boards and is a must-have.

The thing that really makes this motherboard stand out is its memory capabilities. Not only is it a rare thing to find ATX boards with 12 DIMM slots, the Gigabyte MU70-SU0 is also able to run all of this memory at a maximum speed of up to 2133MHz. That is a unique feature and one that will make a world of difference for memory hungry applications. Just remember that the trade-off involves specific CPU cooler support.

Pros: