Pro WS W680M-ACE SE Intel® LGA 1700 mATX BMC AST2600 onboard Workstation Motherboard, PCIe® 5.0×16 Slot, DDR5, ECC Memory and XMP Support, Dual Intel® 2.5 Gb LAN, 2xPCIe 4.0 M.2…

The CPU socket on the first board I received had bent pins so it was unusable and I sent it back. It looks like I’m not the only once to have experienced this.

The second board was fully functional.

What I love about this board is that you can switch off the IPMI, Aspeed onboard video and IP functions by simply flicking switches on the motherboard. In the meantime you have a workstation motherboard with high quality components and rock solid stability that supports ECC RAM and all this wrapped up in an mATX format. In other words this motherboard can be the foundation of a very powerful computer in a small package that should turn out to be highly reliable.

One of the great things about reading motherboard reviews is that you realize that some reviewers simply don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re not as experienced as they think they are.

Read the reviews carefully then and make a decision.

This board isn’t cheap but if you know what you are doing it’s well worth it.

A good portion of this motherboard is frustrating.

1. BIOS Updates: The recommendation from the product support page claims that you should update Intel ME before updating the BIOS. Fun fact, you can only do that from within a Windows OS. This is a server motherboard and should not have that limitation as something close to >90% of servers are running a flavor of Linux. This means you need to standup a special VM just to update the BIOS on this machine.

2. ASUS Control Center Express does not work with this motherboard. One of the perks of a server board is the BMC/IPMI functions so you don’t need to be sitting in front of the box with a monitor and keyboard to use it. The advertising for this product claim that you can make that functionality even better by using a product that they provide a license for along with the purchase. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with the BMC/IPMI on this motherboard. Screenshots provided as evidence that nothing is populated in the dashboard and it throws an error when attempting to use the various functions.

3. SlimSAS Port doesn’t come with a cable. For a motherboard of this price, you should include small things like that, in my opinion.

4. Customer Service is atrocious. I registered the product and reached out to customer service after spending a week of doing my own troubleshooting with the previous issues. Not only was the initial customer service representative not able to help, they “escalated” me to another person who didn’t respond for TWO WEEKS! That is unacceptable customer service for a board of this price. Who knows how long it’ll be before they respond again.

I’m not returning the motherboard because the hassle of taking all my services down and migrating them again is greater than the cost of keeping it, but I’m very disappointed overall. I expect better from server quality components and from ASUS as a whole.

I decided to order this board even though the only reviews that were listed were negative (mine arrived with NO bent pins). I paired it with ECC Ram – Kingston’s KSM48E40BS8KM-16HM (2 sticks for 32GB) and an Intel 12600K – lowest/cheapest proc that supports ECC – be sure to check and see if your CPU support ECC before you order – not all do and may cause problems I would imagine. I also decided to run Debian 12 on it instead of Windows (Linux is not listed as a supported OS on ASUS’s website). I have been using it for a couple weeks now and everything is working great. Here are a few caveats with this board that I have encountered:

BMC remote management works great with Windows. However, I am running Debian and it works but remote control is a bit slow. However, the other features work fine (remote media, power control, etc). You can even flash the BIOS right from the BMC. Awesome! One thing to note with Linux – Do not have a monitor plugged into the server at the same time you are trying to use the Remote Control. The remote control ends up as a second screen and not the primary. This drove me crazy for a bit until I figured out what was going on. Run the server headless and you are ok. There may be a way around this but I haven’t found it yet.

The SlimSAS-SAS port does NOT support SAS disks unfortunately. I tried a slim SAS to SAS cable and it does not work. SlimSAS to SATA works fine though using the same cable. If you need SAS disk support, you will need a SAS controller card in one of the PCI Express slots.

Debian OS – Have to set static ip address. For some reason when using DHCP it will not get an ip address unless you manually click connect in the dialog box (if you are using a GUI and KDE – maybe it will work if you just run without the GUI?? havent tested, need the GUI for my specific use case). 2.5Gbps networking works great. All other items were detected and work perfect – USB, etc.

Overall I am happy with this board. Has some unique features that arent in too many boards such as ECC and the BMC. Also being able to use quick sync with the 12600K.