I like the board, but I think it will only take ECC RAM. They also sell RAM kits, but as with the motherboard, their prices aren't great. The combos are much better priced. You can get a dual E5-2670/motherboard/128 Gb ECC RAM system for ~$500.
There is a clearance issue with this motherboard. My PCI-e graphics card (Radeon HD 7770) I was going to use would not fit because it was right over the top of one of the banks of RAM... keeping it from seating properly. The HD 7770 is a pretty short card, but it was still a problem--it might work with a riser, but I didn't have one to try. I don't do much if any gaming anymore (occasional StarCraft II), so the video for me is just basic I/O. This system is really just for number-crunching so, I got a cheap little NVIDIA Geforce 710 (x8) card for it. It has some very basic on-chip video, but it was not very good, and the Geforce 710 fits the bill for me. Most of the time, I just remote into this system from my main system anyway, so I rarely even turn on the monitor hooked to it.
These server boards take a long time to boot... maybe 3 minutes or so. I assume it has something to do with some error-checking during the boot process, but I'm not sure. I didn't waste a SSD in this system because the boot process is so slow (before it even gets to the hard drive to load the OS).
I use this system to perform finite element analyses, but I do compress the occasional video on it. As an example, a 1 hour and 55 minute 1080p video took 2 hours and 36 minutes to convert to MP4 (2-pass, high profile) using Handbrake on my i7-4770K system. That same video took 1 hour and 3 minutes on the dual E5-2670. The i7-4770K system averaged 35 frames per second over the 2-pass process, and the dual E5-2670 system averaged 86 frames per second.
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