worked right away. didn't even have to reinstall windows to swap the CPU from my old board.
Was looking for a cheap motherboard with dual PCI-e x16 which this board has. I am using it to run a render node for Octane render engine. All is well, except that I had planned to run the system headless and apparently this board won't boot if there isn't a monitor present. Who knew? That.. and the CPU fan connector is different just 'cause. Thanks Dell! I should have done better research before buying but I had no idea either of those things would be an issue since I've never used a Dell motherboard before. So yeah... for what I paid it was totally worth it to gain a PCI-e x16 and 2 more RAM slots compared to my old board.
Motherboard came well packaged and has worked perfectly. These boards (with right CPU / I have an older i7-2600, 16gb of DDR3, and a 156 SSD and it flies) are the cheapest way to be able to own a high performance workstation for those of us who don't have an extra couple hundred dollars for a new aftermarket board.(not to mention most of the time new components for compatibility reasons{memory, processor, graphics board if you go with AMD}). These dell optiplex setups are the best for getting high speed for less money. It uses the cheaper DDR3 memory and I believe it;ll hold up to 32gb of memory.