+2
Gosh. This mammoth is assembled. I realized about halfway in that I didn't bring a monitor with me to test so ima hafta plug into the TV via HDMI at some point. Too, this MOBO has a merged keyboard/mouse port that I'm also not prepared for so it may be Thursday before I can test boot to the BIOS.
All things considered, I really enjoyed this experience and learned a lot---mostly what not to over think. I have no GPU, but the processor has Intel UHD. This is mostly for audio work so that should be fine. Down the line I may step up to something dedicated but that may be a while.
I'm very impressed with both the motherboard and case. Huge space! The case is 4U so it's quite tall for a horizontal rack-mount case. I was worried about the CPU cooler being too tall for the case but nope. I was worried about the cooler fan blocking RAM slots, but nope again. Space is great. It could be a MASSIVE GIJoe base of operations.
Right now I have two 120mm fans on the underside blowing into the HD cage. There is another 120mm fan on the side pulling air in blowing over the RAM and into the CPU cooler fan. The CPU fan then pushes air through the cooling radiator, toward the back of the case. In the rear are two 80mm exit fans to pull the hot air out and through the back. There is room for another CPU fan, as well as another 120mm intake fan on the side. Fancy thing about these Noctua fans is that they include so many cables extensions and a Y-adapter for syncing two fans on the same motherboard header. That maybe be standard practice for all case fan manufacturers but I thought it was nice. Too, the 3" extension added to one fan kept both cables the same length before the Y. I mean to say that one fan was farther away from the header than the other, so with the Y-adapter the closest one had extra slack. An extension on the farthest one out evened things up allowing me to tuck them both flat around the case.
I only have the one SSD drive for now to act as my boot drive. I'll eventually get a second SSD for storage. The HD cage is empty but I may eventually fill them with backup storage. I'm not sure if I want the added weight, heat, and air flow clutter though. With the available ports I may just keep backups on external drives and be done with it.
Tomorrow or the day after I will try to get into the BIOS and make sure everything is connected correctly, fans running, etc., etc. Then it's off to the OS! ...I think.