Whether it's still true or not i'm not 100% sure but in the past SuperMicro has had very limited compatibility with GPUs (mainly due to BIOS so there was no way for you to fix it) whereas ASUS and Gigabyte worked with pretty much anything. May not be so bad now, but i do see the PCIe lanes are severly hamstringed on this board and you are required to use at least 1 GPU since this board has no onboard video like the ASUS and Gigabytes do.
Also this board has no SAS ports for your drives where ASUS and Gigabyte do. These ports use the same plugs as SATA and are 100% compatible (you can connect SATA to SAS, but not SAS to SATA )but offer double the bandwidth of SATA 3.
Edit: Not that you may need those extra features...just saying. Gigabyte did have some lower cost boards with those features around the $400 range but can't find any available anymore :/ The reason for the high price of the MD80-TM0 is the insane Intel X540-t2 ethernet controller which costs ~$300 to buy as a standalone on a PCIe card as it allows for 20 Gb/s total ethernet bandwidth - 10 times the bandwidth of the other boards..
Last edited by John P. Myers; 04-11-16 at 09:22 PM.