Are the Supermicro X10DAC and MBD-X10DRC series motherboards hackable

I'm tempted to built a system off the Supermicro X10DAi, X10DAC, or X10DAX workstation boards or in the extreme case either the X10DRi-LN4+, X10DRi-T4+, X10DRC-LN4+, X10DRC-T4+, which are not workstation boards. Are these hackable though and if so are there any documented cases of a successful hack or installation on these?

Supermicro make great server boards. ECC memory, lights out operation, lots of RAM slots, custom BIOS... (whoops, thats a bit of a problem).

I think you'd be in for a really great learning curve and your chances of success are proportional to your learning curve

What advantages would you actually get from using a SM board? I'm unclear what the ECC memory would mean, probably that you'd have to use only one profile. Not sure what the graphics capabilities are since they normally sit in big racks in a lights out data centre.

I'm not knocking them, I'm looking at one for a FreeNAS server but for a desktop, nope, not worth the hassle and effort. get an Asus or Gigabyte and have done with it.

rwillett said:

Supermicro make great server boards. ECC memory, lights out operation, lots of RAM slots, custom BIOS... (whoops, thats a bit of a problem).

I think you'd be in for a really great learning curve and your chances of success are proportional to your learning curve

What advantages would you actually get from using a SM board? I'm unclear what the ECC memory would mean, probably that you'd have to use only one profile. Not sure what the graphics capabilities are since they normally sit in big racks in a lights out data centre.

I'm not knocking them, I'm looking at one for a FreeNAS server but for a desktop, nope, not worth the hassle and effort. get an Asus or Gigabyte and have done with it.

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I don't see why a custom bios is a problem, but if you helped developed multi-beast or clover perhaps you would or if you just know more about how to use them. I'm using Gigabyte in my Single processor desktop workstation and server, but I want to complete a higher end Workstation build using the Lian-Li D8000 case and the X10DAi, X10DAC, or X10DAX workstation boards are the only boards compatible with it because the case only supports large boards up to HPTX and E-ATX. While almost all ASUS server or workstation boards are EEB form factor and don't suggest that they are the same or compatible with cases that only support up to E-ATX.

As for Gigabyte I'm considering theirs latest boards again but I'm a little disappointed in the Max memory support, although 512 GB is not bad for those. Nevermind aboutthe X10DRi-LN4+, X10DRi-T4+, X10DRC-LN4+, and X10DRC-T4+ Supermicro boards as well because those are EEATX, which are also to big and I don't have room for another rack solution at the moment. One last thing about Gigabyte is that if I chose their boards again I'm considering this MD70-HB0 or this MD70-HB1, but I'm not sure about the max memory support and if I'll be completely satisfied with it. I do have the 7PESH3 in my server and it's max of 256 GB seems fine considering I'm no where close to having it maxed out yet at a minimum of 32 GB, but for a high end workstation I would feel more comfortable Knowing it could support 512 GB or double that at least and Gigabyte just isn't telling me how much it actually supports.

Those gigabyte boards are E-ATX/ SSI EEB, so that will work in regards to that. However, if I'm not mistaken the specs say 16 slots with up 32 GB or 64 GB each, which would make either 512 GB or 1024 GB and would fulfill my desired specs for a Xeon 2600 v3 workstation motherboard. The recent Asus Workstation dual processor boards are EEB, but are the same dimensions as the Gigabyte boards mentions in this reply and just might work as well. Either way that almost leaves me with three great choices between the three manufacturers or at least between Asus and Gigabyte.

The reason I pointed out the BIOS is that Supermicro run their own BIOS system and have their own components further down the hardware chain so they are not the same as the more common BIOS/UEFI systems available through desktop vendors. I do not know how they present their information to the OS and whether you can make assumptions about what is happening deep down. e.g. will theFakeSMC stuff work, there are lots of 'delicate' shims used to make things work in the Hackintosh world and if something isn't quite normal then stuff just doesn't work, certain graphics cards being a good example. Also as I recall any BIOS changes have to come directly from Supermicro on a special key.

If you need any support from anybody else the chances of anybody else going down the Supermicro route is very low. Thats why I said the learning curve will be exciting.

If your need is for 256GB or 1TB of RAM, then the costs involved in doing this are very high. That combined with the high end CPU needed puts you in a very small group of people which means that the potential support for all this is minimal. I've put together systems with 1TB of RAM but we are now into professional area where people expect a different level of support.

All of this is hypothetical, nobody is stopping you putting it together to try it out and I would be extremely interested in how it works. I have a use case myself for very high levels of RAM, circa 256GB to 512GB but it fits into the database area so I just use a IBM P-Series instead, which is quite cost effective.

Let us know how it goes.

Rob.

I took this at face value until reading the moderator response here. Now I've stopped looking for a non-Supermicro motherboard, to being thoroughly confused on which person is right.

rwillett said:

The reason I pointed out the BIOS is that Supermicro run their own BIOS system and have their own components further down the hardware chain so they are not the same as the more common BIOS/UEFI systems available through desktop vendors. I do not know how they present their information to the OS and whether you can make assumptions about what is happening deep down. e.g. will theFakeSMC stuff work, there are lots of 'delicate' shims used to make things work in the Hackintosh world and if something isn't quite normal then stuff just doesn't work, certain graphics cards being a good example. Also as I recall any BIOS changes have to come directly from Supermicro on a special key.

If you need any support from anybody else the chances of anybody else going down the Supermicro route is very low. Thats why I said the learning curve will be exciting.

If your need is for 256GB or 1TB of RAM, then the costs involved in doing this are very high. That combined with the high end CPU needed puts you in a very small group of people which means that the potential support for all this is minimal. I've put together systems with 1TB of RAM but we are now into professional area where people expect a different level of support.

All of this is hypothetical, nobody is stopping you putting it together to try it out and I would be extremely interested in how it works. I have a use case myself for very high levels of RAM, circa 256GB to 512GB but it fits into the database area so I just use a IBM P-Series instead, which is quite cost effective.

Let us know how it goes.

Rob.

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I don't have a working Hackintosh yet, but... point of clarification, I have a Supermicro X10DAX, it runs AMI BIOS. From my manual:

16MB AMI SPI BIOS® (Dual: X10DAX, One: X10DAi/ X10DAC)

ThunderDome said:

I took this at face value until reading the moderator response here. Now I've stopped looking for a non-Supermicro motherboard, to being thoroughly confused on which person is right.

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Since I'm the person who is apparently confusing you I thought I'd take the chance to reply

When I wrote this, I had looked at using the SuperMicro motherboards as they could handle large amounts of memory. I did as much research as I could at the time as I was interested in running very large databases and 256GB of RAM was attractive to me. The research I did indicated that the BIOS is use for Supermicro at the time (which was two years ago) was non-standard. I know that Supermicro makes great motherboards, which is why we wanted to use them, but the research I did showed that the BIOS was slightly modified to take advantage of the different motherboards.

As I said at the time "I do not know how they present their information to the OS and whether you can make assumptions about what is happening deep down. e.g. will theFakeSMC stuff work". To the best of my knowledge that is still correct, I cannot state with 100% certainty as I do not have a motherboard to test this out on.

I also recall that some graphics cards may not work as these motherboards are often designed for large lights out data centres, where running a powerful graphics card is not needed, or indeed any graphics card.

The fact that Supermicro sends out it's own BIOS upgrades on a key could well indicate that the BIOS is non-standard.

I also stated that you would be in a small minority if you did do this work but I'd love to see it working. However I do not have the time to make it work, nor possibly the skill. I pointed out that this could be hard work.

I've read through my e-mail and I still stand by what I said at the time. It may well be that this is a perfectly simple build. Brilliant, but I wouldn't want somebody coming back to me saying that I'd caused them to waste many hundreds of pounds and hundreds of hours getting a board that will not work. I pointed out that I have an IBM p-Series for big databases as that works very well, for me.

My personal view then is that if you could afford the RAM to stuff an MB with 512GB, I'd buy a real Mac or a big server and run Linux on it. Its a massive amount of money to gamble on an unknown system. I still stand by that view for my money.

You are welcome to take my advice or leave it. Its worth exactly what you paid for it. Nothing

"The reason I pointed out the BIOS is that Supermicro run their own BIOS system and have their own components further down the hardware chain so they are not the same as the more common BIOS/UEFI systems available through desktop vendors. I do not know how they present their information to the OS and whether you can make assumptions about what is happening deep down. e.g. will theFakeSMC stuff work, there are lots of 'delicate' shims used to make things work in the Hackintosh world and if something isn't quite normal then stuff just doesn't work, certain graphics cards being a good example. Also as I recall any BIOS changes have to come directly from Supermicro on a special key."