The MSI C236A Workstation Motherboard Continues Working Out Great For Skylake Xeons

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The MSI C236A Workstation Motherboard Continues Working Out Great For Skylake Xeons

Just in case any of you now are thinking about building a Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" workstation-ish system now that the prices are getting lower, I just wanted to pass along that the MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard is still serving me very reliably and ended up picking up another one of these boards when a Supermicro Skylake board stopped working...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MSI-C236A-Workstation-Redux

[Techwolf]

Are any features advertized by the board NOT aviable on linux? It seems every MB advterizes a slew of features, but when digging into it, are windows only. So one is left with a featureless board for linux.

[torsionbar28]

Sounds like the Supermicro board stopped working because Michael deleted some required boot variables. Not a failure of the hardware. Part of the reason I've stayed away from UEFI, it allows you to brick the board. Some of those variables are required for it to work, delete them all and it becomes a paperweight. This is true regardless of board vendor. Not sure if this is poor design of UEFI, or poor design of how the vars are exposed in Linux. IME Supermicro boards are top notch, and have full official Linux support across their entire product line.