What motherboard do you use for your dual Xeon setup?

[Living Legend]

I'm looking to upgrade my server to a dual Xeon setup.  Something in the E5-2650 to E5-2670 range.

 

What motherboards have you guys had success with?

 

I'm not looking for any special features outside of being able to run VMs without any types of issues passing through hardware. 

 

Edited April 6, 2017 by Living Legend

[PanteraGSTK]

Keep in mind that the first gen range is getting older (still great, I have some) but that makes motherboards somewhat difficult to find depending on what you're looking for.

 

I have zero issues with my intel S2600CP, but if it goes out, I'm toast unless I get a backup.

[Living Legend]

@PanteraGSTK Yeah, that seems to be one of the most popular ones.

 

Natex still has some good deals with the mobo/cpu/ram combos using that board.

 

That begs another question.  In the case of multiple dockers & vms, is there going to be a difference in performance between PC3-10600 and PC3-12800?

Edited April 7, 2017 by Living Legend

[Greygoose]

so dual e5-2670 would give 32cores?

[DoeBoye]

4 hours ago, Greygoose said:

so dual e5-2670 would give 32cores?

 Well, 32 threads. There are still only 8 cores per chip, so 16 physical cores, but when designating 'cores' in Unraid for VMs and Dockers, you have 32 to play with... That said, it's usually recommended to assign the pairs together, so in reality, there are still 16 'sets' you can assign (and this applies to all CPUs in UnRaid).

[DoeBoye]

As for the original question, I use the ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16. Other than one irritating bios bug, the board has been great. The problem is that my board (and most other people I have communicated with who have this board) will trigger false CPU overheating events (Temp goes to 101 degrees Celcius) periodically. If you don't have a plugin that sends you alerts, you may not even know it, but if you do, you can get peppered with emails telling you that your CPUs are melting down.

 

I have reached out to ASRock and they tell me they are working on a bios update to fix this... in the meantime, I have used the ipmi plugin to modify the threshold temp to 102 Celcius so the alert is not triggered.

 

Also, if the alert gets triggered, the case and CPU fans sometimes get stuck at full speed and will only return to smart fan settings on a reboot. Again, with my temporary threshold temp adjustment, that never happens, but it is a work around, and I would like to see a real solution from ASRock...

[Greygoose]

Is there a recommended board that is reliable for these CPU's, i was considering Ryzen but this looks more benificial.

[DoeBoye]

There is no official recommended board. Your best bet is to find a decent mobo that fits your bill, then scour the boards looking for other people using it... Supermicro is generally fairly safe, though expensive.

 

I don't recall seeing any complaints re: the Intel boards that Natex sells. Were I to build another one of these today, I would probably go for one of those (Mostly because of price).

 

Finally, If ASRock could fix this bios bug, the board I'm using would also be a good solution. It has all the bells and whistles, IPMI, 4 ethernet ports, multiple USB controllers, lots of PCI-e slots, plenty of onboard sata (Though avoid using the Marvell controller (4 ports) - They are flaky in UnRaid - There's a thread in here with a list of all the Marvell controllers affected - it's not just the one on this board)

 

 

[ashman70]

First you have to establish a budget, then feature set, what features do you want your board to have beyond dual CPU's? Then think about a case, because there are different sizes of dual cpu motherboards, they are not all ATX, some are E-ATX or EE-ATX you have to be careful you don't buy a board that will only fit in a handful of expensive cases. Then there is always compatibility, if you buy a board that no one has installed unRAID on you are going to be on your own trying to figure things out, so going with a recognized brand like SuperMicro, Intel, Asrock, Asus etc is a good idea.

[Greygoose]

Thanks for the advice.  I will spend a bit more time looking into the build before i make any purchases.

[METDeath]

I run a SuperMicro  X9DR3-F because I wanted to run multiple HTPC VMs with it now, and in the future. I'm currently only running one though. It was one of the few boards with plenty of x16 slots though. So that was the primary reason I picked it. Plus the SAS and SATA ports helped me cut down on addon cards so I only run one extra controller card instead of the three I had to run before.

[PanteraGSTK]

On 4/6/2017 at 8:21 PM, Living Legend said:

@PanteraGSTK Yeah, that seems to be one of the most popular ones.

 

Natex still has some good deals with the mobo/cpu/ram combos using that board.

 

That begs another question.  In the case of multiple dockers & vms, is there going to be a difference in performance between PC3-10600 and PC3-12800?

 

I honestly doubt you'd notice much if any difference.