Dual Xeon Motherboard Recommendations 01.2015

[EDGERIDER]

looking forward to see that happening as I am in the same boat.

is there a reason why you chose that particular motherboard over the X10DAi?

it looks to me that the SAS internal controller is just asking for trouble if you will implement an areca card.

it remain unclear for me if it is possible to have a UEFI bios on that motherboard.

I deeply believe that all motherboard manufacturer should invest in having at least 3 motherboard (cheap and compact I3-I5 / enthusiast I7/PRO xeon ) very close to mac specs and with a very close uefi bio to what apple do. they wouldn't have to advertise that they are Hackintosh friendly, just give a board to review to a couple of tester, and they would make money. if there was a board that would mimic apple hardware but in standard PC design, I think they would make a lot of money.

on my Z77 i have a areca 1680Xi with 16 x 4 tb and it is plenty fast speed wise but it take a toll on the graphic cards ( 2X K4000) the machine is fine but just dont have enough PCIE lanes. so it is choking on render.

going from the Promise R6 over thunderbolt to the Areca was just much better : with 16 Tb on the promise in raid 6 I was constantly moving file around to get work done, now with 48 Tb I feel way more confortable.

I already have bought an extra 1680 xi 12 ( got it used for 100$) to see how it would work with 12 cheap SSD : that might be easier to deal with than expensive PCIE SSD and still be able to have over 1Gb/s read /write.

due to the complexity of running dual xeon, I might just go the X99 route until it gets official dual xeon V3 support. this might not happened anytime soon as I dont think they can put two 160w processor in the cylinder...

as long as I can put at least 64 Gb of ram and have 40 PCIE lanes I'll be golden. with the saved cash i might go the twin gtx 980 route over the twin K4000.

 

[davidahn]

May I ask why you chose the 780 over the 980?

It was purchased in April 2014, the 980 was released September 2014.

 

[davidahn]

is there a reason why you chose that particular motherboard over the X10DAi?

The X10DAi/DAC/DAX are apparently sister motherboards (they share a manual), but only the X10DAX supports SLI and Thunderbolt, which I figured I would need. Hence the DAX.

it remain unclear for me if it is possible to have a UEFI bios on that motherboard.

The manual specifies support for EFI/UEFI. "Boot Mode Select. Use this item to select the type of device to be used for system boot. The options are Legacy, UEFI, and Dual."

48 TB of RAID storage? Overkill for me. You must be doing 4K video all day! If so, you could definitely use dual 16-18 core Xeons.

I certainly hope this motherboard will do everything I want, which is mainly to boot into OS X 10.10.X and kick serious arse.

 

[trs96]

Good luck on your build and OS X install David ! Make sure to document your steps as you
go and post a user build with pics of this Ubertosh project you are undertaking. This will help
many others in the community to see what it takes to make a dual socket Xeon build work.

 

[robinqu]

Hi, davidahn. Can you elaborate more about your build? I'm particularly interested in a build with Haswell-EP.

 

[EDGERIDER]

thanks for your reply !

as soon as you have a machine set up and booting, I will be happy to help if i can.

I'm pretty good setting up raid, so if I can help....

as far as what i have tested you dont need to buy the newest raid card because there is absolutely no drive that goes beyond 160 mb/s in either way. I have an old 1680XI from areca but with 4 gigs of ram and 16 port and I get very steady result around 1gb/s read write.

i even think that now my processor is the weak link as on everything that i do it almost goes 100% all the time.

also as I am sharing the PCIE lane on the Z77 i think nothing is really working at 100% except the processor.

there might be some room for improvement going from 16 lane to 40 lanes.

yes I do work with phantom 4k raw rushes along with a 75 camera bullet time rig.

on set we need to be able to gather and develop 75 canon raw frame from the 75 x EOS 600D, assemble them as a movie and play them to the client.

so basically you need to play 75x 16 megapixel in 14 bit witch is 2250 Mb

the phantom rushes are 5 to 6 Gb for 8 seconds

so when you play both on a timeline you need to have speed, but also space....

let me know if I can help and when you have the computer assembled and booting...

ps : Go big on the PSU : over 900w platinum is a bare minimum i think.... my 860 went boom after 2 month... I now on a 1200W PSU...

 

[davidahn]

Thanks, Edgerider. Sounds like you're doing some cool stuff with your phantom rushes! You need the power more than I do. I'll only occasionally max out my setup for a few minutes at a time.

I struggled mightily to squeeze two Corsair H80i 120mm water CPU coolers in my case, had to take a Dremel to it, but I'm past that now. I've got everything installed but a couple of SATA power plugs and a lot of cable management, but I should be able to fire her up this weekend.

I got the RocketRAID 3620 8-channel SATA HBA, I heard the chipset has the goods. My WD Black HDDs can do 186.7MB each, so a 6-drive RAID5 array should be good for 933MB/s, theoretically. I'll shout out if I need some help; thanks for the offer.

I got a 1300W EVGA 80 Plus Gold PSU, I hope I should be good. Thanks!

as soon as you have a machine set up and booting, I will be happy to help if i can.

I'm pretty good setting up raid, so if I can help....

as far as what i have tested you dont need to buy the newest raid card because there is absolutely no drive that goes beyond 160 mb/s in either way. I have an old 1680XI from areca but with 4 gigs of ram and 16 port and I get very steady result around 1gb/s read write.

i even think that now my processor is the weak link as on everything that i do it almost goes 100% all the time.

also as I am sharing the PCIE lane on the Z77 i think nothing is really working at 100% except the processor.

there might be some room for improvement going from 16 lane to 40 lanes.

yes I do work with phantom 4k raw rushes along with a 75 camera bullet time rig.

on set we need to be able to gather and develop 75 canon raw frame from the 75 x EOS 600D, assemble them as a movie and play them to the client.

so basically you need to play 75x 16 megapixel in 14 bit witch is 2250 Mb

the phantom rushes are 5 to 6 Gb for 8 seconds

so when you play both on a timeline you need to have speed, but also space....

let me know if I can help and when you have the computer assembled and booting...

ps : Go big on the PSU : over 900w platinum is a bare minimum i think.... my 860 went boom after 2 month... I now on a 1200W PSU...

 

[davidahn]

Good luck on your build and OS X install David ! Make sure to document your steps as you
go and post a user build with pics of this Ubertosh project you are undertaking. This will help
many others in the community to see what it takes to make a dual socket Xeon build work.

I'm planning on posting in the User Builds section once I'm done.

I've actually already built a successful dual Xeon E5620 build (4 core 2.2 GHz) on an EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard (O/C to 3 GHz). It was a royal mix-up; you can read about it here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-...ed-sr-2-ubertosh-ripped-off-disappointed.html Geekbench was 14,780 at 3 GHz, but I was hoping for at least double that. I'd already built a Windows Server with it, otherwise the X5680s O/C'ed to 3.5-4GHz should have been good for a Geekbench of at least 30,000. I hope the new Ubertosh will get a Geekbench 3 of closer to 90,000. Assuming it runs.

 

[thewisevaloo]

Any updates, David? I'm super intrigued!

 

[nikezzz]

@davidahn try to disable Hyperthreading as you are using 64 Logical cores with these Processors and Mac OS X doesn't support more than 32 Logical cores as far as I know ... Also try MacPro5,1 SMBios or MacPro6,1 and I would recommend clover because you might need the HaswellE Patch (onthefly)

EDIT: Forgot that 2699v3s have 18 cores so Limit the CPUs to 16 each and turn off Hyperthreading