Great Socket 1151 board:

 

http://www.supermicro.co.uk/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SAE-M.cfm

 

IPMI is a good option, so are the 8xSATA (ideal IMHO).

 

Questions:

• Can we use that M2 slot for cache? Looks like we can! 8x SATA slots for HDDs.
  
• Is there a PCI-E 3.0 4x GFX card that can be passed through? Looks like a 1x GPU will work here.
  
• Can we pass through the 16x and 4x slots at the same time? Looks like this is also a yes.
  
• Can the PCI slot be used for a DVB card? Looks like it also!
  
• From the photos you could also get away with a long GPU as well
  

 

In summary, a great board for mATX system builders that ticks a lot of boxes for making a small and compact server with 8 drives.

 

Now, what case to put this in...

I'm just not feeling the love for this board. It is aimed at a workstation user with the legacy PCI slot. Slightly better is the X11SAE.

 

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SAE.cfm

 

But that one has two PCI slots. I think the best is yet to come. The biggest changes with this generation (C236 chipset) is DMI 3.0 (double bandwidth), 8 SATA ports native (I agree this is big) and 64 G. memory (wow).

I plan on building a new server sometime next year.  Probably be an 8 core e5 broadwell. I'm waiting on motherboards with built in 10GbE and lots of pcie slots.

Nice board but definitely has a few shortcomings ... as already noted, the PCI slot is essentially "wasted" => it'd be far nicer if it had another PCIe x4 or larger slot.

 

Yes, the x1 video card will work in the x4 slot; and yes, you should be able to pass through cards in both the x16 and x1 slots.

 

The 8 SATA ports are definitely nice; and support for 64GB of ECC memory is nice as well.

 

... and yes, you can put an M.2 SSD in the M.2 slot for your cache drive.

 

I actually like using the PCI slots as pass through (in ESXi anyway) for HDD controllers for a Windows VM for my TV server.  And since this has two I could also use it for a USB card for my HD-PVRs to the same VM.  It also has lots of PCIe 1x slots for HVR-2250s and Colossus cards.  So it looks quite good for what I usually build since all of mine are headless servers - even the VMs.  I don't need GUI pass through and the 2 x16 (x8/x8) would work perfectly for two M1015s for unRAID especially if I would use the 8 built in and ran unRAID native - no SAS expander to get unRAID to 24 drives.  If I didn't already have working systems (Tyan S5512) I would probably give these serious thought.

You're clearly referring to the X11SAE that ohlwiler mentioned ... not the X11SAE-M that the OP asked about.

 

It is indeed a nicer board, with much better expansion capability.

 

You're clearly referring to the X11SAE that ohlwiler mentioned ... not the X11SAE-M that the OP asked about.

 

It is indeed a nicer board, with much better expansion capability.

Yep I see that now.  Opps!

Great response guys. Indeed the X11SAE-F might be better, however this post was specifically for that mATX form factor, that can get you a nice and small server put together.

 

Find a case that takes mATX and 8 hot swap drives and you've got a great mid-range system here!