ASUS Pro B650M-CT-CSM AMD B650 AM5 Ryzen™ Desktop 9000 8000 & 7000 Micro-ATX mATX business motherboard DDR5, PCIe 5.0, USB 3.2, M.2, with enhanced security, reliability, manageability & serviceability

very good old bios design.

I purchased the B650M-CT-CSM to run Proxmox, with ECC memory, in my home lab. I'm happy to say everything works fine using two Kingston Ksm48e40bd8ki-32ha 32GB UDIMMs w/ ECC.The BIOS isn't graphical but I found it very complete. ECC controls were in the DRAM menu and they include both ECC enable/auto/disable *and* it included an option to enable ECC error *injection*. (I've not tested the latter because I don't have a copy of the 'Pro' version of memtest86+).One of the Asus docs online said the board supports x4/x4/x4/x4 PCIe bifurcation on the x16 slot and I'm happy to report that this option does exist in the BIOS. (Note, I've not tested it). And, to Asus credit, the BIOS *also* has options to enable PCIe x8/x8 bifurcation on the x16 slot with an appropriate riser card.This board doesn't include a BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) with IPMI so some may say it isn't a "real" server motherboard. But, for the price, it's surprisingly good. 5 Stars!

The board works, and it reflects a design ethos from before everything in the world was a blinged-out gamer rig. I didn't want any stylized elements or RGB lighting, I just wanted a simple, reliable motherboard with decent features. But there are some flaws. First of all, I had stability trouble in Windows 11 with the "Clock Watchdog Timeout" blue-screen (black-screen) error, which meant the Clock Watchdog setting had to be disabled in the BIOS/UEFI. The BIOS/UEFI of this board is not a graphical interface but a DOS-style text-based one like the BIOSes of the 90's and early 2000's, with no mouse cursor or clickable items. Yes, that's the way things 'used to be' but it seemed like ASUS could have ported their graphical UEFI interface from another newer model instead of writing a specific text-only BIOS interface. At least some essential quality of life features (like smart fan speed control) are here, it's just a bit more difficult to find more specialized settings like the Clock Watchdog Disable option. Second of all, the board wouldn't boot or even attempt to train its memory settings with all 4 DDR5-5600 DIMMs populated with dual-rank Crucial DDR5 Pro modules, so even though I bought 128GB, I could only use 2x32 DIMMs for 64GB (and with memory prices now through the roof, I'm stuck with that for now). The other issue I have is not a performance or operability one, but sometimes the power LED gets stuck in the slow flashing mode when the machine wakes from sleep. This is a cheap motherboard and there are better ones out there. But the overall value is good - it would just be better if those minor quibbles were resolved.

I would get occasional reboots of a server I had on my home network using this board. I thought it was configuration driven, or maybe my old PSU, or a used HBA... ended up being this Amazon-Renewed motherboard.