2P socket 2011 xeon - which board?

JonJ678 · 3 Aug 2016 at 21:46

Hey. Somewhat late to the party, I've finally noticed ebay selling second hand E5-2670s. So I bought two.

They need ddr3, which is unfortunate but workable. I'm good there.

They also need a motherboard which takes two processors. Here I'm out of my depth - supermicro sell such a beast, but I'd really like it to fit in an atx case. e-atx is probably fine too, but I'm limited to 7 slots. I think Asus made a play for this market.

Could someone recommend a motherboard? Perhaps you've bought some out of date 2011 chips in a similar moment of core greed.

Thank you!

edit: So far I have found the supermicro X9DR7-LN4F at roughly £550 and a few asus boards for £400 ish (e.g. Z9PE-D8 WS) and am thinking I'll need to measure my case very carefully. There seems to be multiple versions of socket 2011 and this is slowing down the search.

neodude · 11 Aug 2016 at 19:09

I got 2 of the cheap E5s earlier in the year and got the ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS, other than the very poor Marvell controller that comes with it I've got no complaints at all. I'm running UnRaid on it with a Windows 10 VM, an OSX El Capitan VM and multiple dockers, all running very smoothly.

JonJ678 · 12 Aug 2016 at 00:02

Thanks! That's good to hear, but fractionally too late for me. I'm currently looking at a supermicro X9DAE but haven't hit the power button for want of a heatsink. Lots of research trying to work out if the board would work with normal components, especially the power supply, so feeling anxious.

Presumably this is the one in your sig. Gaming VM is an interesting statement there - how have you found the PCI-E passthrough in practice? I'd accept fairly serious overhead in exchange for not needing a native Windows install alongside CentOS.

It's also reassuring to know someone else on the boards was tempted by the second hand E5s.

neodude · 12 Aug 2016 at 16:17

The gaming VM runs fine. Runs everything I've thrown at it at full settings. As well as the GPU passed though I also have a SATA card passed through which allows me to use a BluRay drive as if it's connected to the VM and a USB3 card passed through which allows me to hot plug USB devices as I would with a standard system. The bonus is that I'm able to off load all the server stuff that my old PC was doing onto docker containers running on separate cores in my UnRaid config. Things like Plex, Sonarr, TS3, Couch Potato, NZBget, Deluge, Crashplan etc.