Supermicro X9SCL-F any good?

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BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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I've been doing some cleaning and inventory reduction (and listing things for sale here and other places)... just found a box with a Supermicro X9SCL-F motherboard in it. I'm not even sure what it was for now, but is this worth something or close to obsolete?
 

dswartz

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Jul 14, 2011
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If 32MB is okay. they are great. I have 3 of them in my home lab: 2 for vsphere 6.0, and 1 for a backup NFS server to serve to the vsphere hosts.
 

Jb boin

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May 26, 2016
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Only unbuffered ECC RAM will work with this board
You are right, its the X8STI (which is from the previous generation of socket/chipset) that does work with both ECC unbuffered and non-ECC (and can work with more memory than the limit advertised on the Supermicro website).


Anyway, we got plenty of these (along with many of its sister X9SCM-F that does have 2*6Gbps SATA ports while all the ports are 3Gbps on the X9SCL-F), the older ones have about 5 years and we only had a few that died or were DOA on maybe 80-90 boards that are still in production.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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hmmm... i don't have the RAM or CPU to test out this board to see if it works right or not.... you guys think it would fetch anything if i listed on ebay "as-is, unknown condition" as an auction? or is it so low value that no one would even bid?
 

Jb boin

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We kept buying these (or SCM-F) until the end of last year for about 120-130€ exvat to use on low cost 1U servers as it was less expensive than X10/X11 motherboards (along with lower cost CPUs) so there is certainly still some interest on selling it.

Selling as-is is always a bit tricky but i think that the IPMI works even if there is neither CPU nor memory one the board, its better than nothing to be able to state that the IPMI is working.
 

MikeChristie

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Jul 27, 2016
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I don't know how much you'd get for the board untested, but as you can pick up a Pentium G620 for about £12 and 2Gb sticks of DDR3 ECC unbuffered for about £6 each it might be worth testing the board and selling it bundled with the CPU and RAM, or just re-listing the CPU and RAM. If you were in the UK I could lend you some RAM and a CPU to test with. I'm seeing these boards on EBay at over $100 up to $150, so it might be worth making a bit of effort in testing it.
 

fractal

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Jun 7, 2016
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I just bought an X9SCL (non F) with I/O shield for 60 USD including shipping on eBay last week. That one was listed for several weeks before I bought it. There are plenty of them listed for more. The versions with IPMI do demand a premium.

I love them as low power servers as long as you can live with the limitations. It does require unbuffered ecc memory that is more expensive than either regular DDR3 or registered memory. It only accepts celeron, pentiums, some i3's and xeons processors. It won't take an i5 or an i7. It has a limited number of PCI slots. The basher box I installed the one I just bought is full with a 10GBE NIC and a SAS card in the two x8 slots and an eSATA card in the x4 in x8 slot. I am using the Celeron I had in the motherboard it is replacing along with some 1G unbuffered ECC DDR3 sticks I had in the parts bin. The X9SCM is a nice choice if you can use the extra x4 in x8 slot but goes for a lot more money.

The other limitation, which I consider the most serious, is it is not ESXi certified and does have a few compatibility issues. I am in the process of moving my public facing VMs from one to a dell R210-ii. This is only an issue if you plan on running ESXi and care about it filling your log file and occasionally crashing one of your VMs.

Oh, and it it has a supermicro proprietary front panel connector. This is not a problem in a supermicro chassis or if your chassis has the individual breakouts. Mine, unfortunately, has a 9pin (2x4) connector and I can't for the life of me find a 9 pin "standard" to 20 pin "supermicro" adapter cable. There are oodles of people selling cables to put non-supermicro boards in supermicro chassis. I got it to work by shorting the "power on" pins with a knife until I figured out I can turn the 9 pin cable sideways to get the power on button connected to the proper pins. It is a pain but works and kinda off topic.
 

cheezehead

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Sep 23, 2012
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I picked up an X9SCL (non F) as well with matching SM chassis a few months ago for $100, stuck a G620t in it and have been using it for a pfSense box ever since.