GIGABYTE X150M-PRO ECC Xeon Motherboard Review

Introduction

The Intel C232 chipset is a mid-range workstation-class platform controller hub aimed at business and workstation users who want to use an Intel Skylake based Xeon CPU. Along with Intel's 6th Generation Core lineup comes the Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 family of processors, which are just Xeon variants of their Core counterparts. The benefit to using a Xeon, over the fact that they should last longer, is that they offer ECC and vPro support. These reasons make the Xeon more preferable in critical workstation and business scenarios, where memory errors cause problems and secure remote access is important.

The X150M-PRO ECC is one of GIGABYTE's C232 chipset-based motherboards. It does carry the desert camouflage theme, which shouldn't matter much, considering workstation users might not care much about aesthetics. The motherboard does bring the basic feature-set that comes with the C232 chipset and offers full Xeon and ECC memory support.

Let's take a look at this little workstation motherboard.

Specifications

The GIGABYTE X150M-Pro ECC supports E3-1200 v5 series processors, four DIMMs of ECC memory, 1Gbit Intel NIC, 2-Way CrossFireX technology, M.2, SATA Express, 6x SATA 6Gb/s, and 6x USB 3.0 ports just to name a few of the features.

Pricing

The X150M-PRO ECC is available from many large retailers for roughly $139.99.