Any thoughts?
No reason it shouldn’t work - I mean depending on your needs it’s probably overkill unless you are pushing a lot of traffic and IPS scanning it all, etc.
Most of these mobile-on-desktop boards do seem to work ok, albeit with some quirks, but it’s impossible to know if there would be any issues specific to this.
Keep in mind ‘ES’ CPUs may have some unknowns in terms of behaviour - hopefully they were just samples for motherboard engineering and not debugging purposes.
I have no idea if ES CPUs get the microcode updates applied in the same way though - maybe Linux kernel guys might be able to answer that.
Looks like someone is trying to get rid of a slightly bad designed motherboard.
The problem is that motherboard is not engineered correctly.
since you looking on the bay and I have been shopping off and on myself for a new machine, this might interest you, since this is one of my candidates I am thinking about getting: