Inventec B400 motherboard

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zack$

Well-Known Member
Aug 16, 2018
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Can confirm no cigar with an i3-4160T. Have seen other posts where the Pentium cpus are also no dice.

These boards also appear to use udimms only.

Interestingly, though, this board seems to come in a b420 "workstation" variant (see here: B420GE0 LGA 1150 Socket Motherboard DDR3 RDIMM 4 slots SATA PCIe x8 ATX | eBay)

From the pictures, there doesn't seem to be the bmc onboard and, oddly enough, the seller suggests ddr3 rdimm ram. Got me thinking whether the board might support the non-xeon CPUs.

There is also this b420 variant that appears to have bmc and 2x rj45 (10gb????, no idea): Inventec Server Motherboard LGA 1150 DDR3 B420GC0 | eBay

Have you tried this board with anything other than Xeon processors? Curious if an i3 Haswell (AESNI and ECC) would work? I have a few laying around. Curious if non-ECC will post. TIA
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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I know of at least 6 variants on the theme. The basic B400 boards, like the one I have, are built on the C204 chipset, but there are a couple of the higher end ones built on the C206 chipset. They seem to range from having dual Gbps LAN onboard, no dedicated IPMI, but having an onboard LSI 2008, to having dedicated 100Mbps IPMI, but limited expansion slots, to having no Gbps LAN at all, but having SFP ports instead, again with limited expansion slots and etc. They were all designed to run E3 chips and UDIMM Memory, both ECC and Non ECC are supported as far as I can tell :)

I chose my board as a good compromise. I was building an AIO box for home use and wanted the flexibility of being able to add several cards, while reducing the number of HBA's I was going to need for my storage. I can live without the IPMI, as I can put hands on whenever I need to. For me, this little board ticks all the boxes. It was, for what I paid for it, an amazingly good deal, as it turned out. The E3-1245 I paired it with, happily keeps up with the half dozen or so VM's I run 24/7 without breaking a sweat. If I had only realised how good these boards were at the time, I would have purchased lots of them for use in remote office projects etc :)
 

cdru

Member
Oct 27, 2018
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The E3-1245 I paired it with, happily keeps up with the half dozen or so VM's I run 24/7 without breaking a sweat.
I was planning on an almost identical purpose system, primarily to replace a power hungry overpowered system that sits idle most of the time. Have you measured what the power draw is at an idle? And if so, care to share the general specs of the system?
 

cdru

Member
Oct 27, 2018
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Thanks, but there are no files attached to the io shield, could you please double check that?
Click on Thing Files and there's IO_Shield.stl listed. It doesn't show an image, at least on my mobile, but was able to download and view the stl in a viewer.
 
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