Review on ASUS WS C246 PRO ATX Motherboard for 8th Generation Intel CPUs - ECC DDR4, M.2, Server Workstation by Alan Massey

Let me start by saying I'm new to PC building and to be honest this was my first build. My property was struck by lightning and my old NAS server went down (QNAP 453a). She was a beast. The drives were still fine, but the ethernet ports were burning, so I figured it was time to put on my big boy pants and build a replacement. Long story short, I spent the night releasing this thing with an i3 8350k processor and 16GB of Corsair Vengence DDR4 RAM. I went to bed and fell asleep on it, and the next day I went through the troubleshooting process. Very glad the board has QCode indicators as well as QLED to show where the board is in the boot process. (Pictures attached) Fast forward to my research and figured I should try flashing the BIOS to see if it gets released. In short, it worked and the board even made it a breeze. If you don't get the message, try flashing the BIOS via USB and the onboard manual flash button. I will update if there are any issues in the future but so far I am very satisfied. The only thing I noticed from reading is that using the M.2 slots either shares bandwidth with the SATA connector (I believe it's sata2) or using another m.2 disables SATA 2 entirely . I'm pretty sure people can work around this with PCIe adapters.