Dual Xeon Motherboard Recommendations 01.2015

[davidahn]

I'm building a monster dual Xeon (E5-2699 v3) setup with an EATX modified Lian-Li case. Any recommendations on the best motherboard for the task? With this chip, which performs very well on benchmarks, I need a 10th gen (Haswell EP) LGA2011 v3 (Socket R3) motherboard. So the options I'm considering are:

Asus Z10PE-D8 WS or Z10PE-D16
Supermicro X10XXX (so many options!)
Gigabyte doesn't seem to have a dual-Socket R3 motherboard

I've seen posts here about successful builds based on Asus Z9PE motherboards and Supermicro X9XXX motherboards, so I'm hopeful. Any suggestions? Am I missing a good option?

Thanks in advance.

David

 

[Going Bald]

Gigabyte doesn't seem to have a dual-Socket R3 motherboard

What makes you think this?
See http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/list.aspx?cg=11&p=189&v=28&ck=101

 

[davidahn]

What makes you think this?
See http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/list.aspx?cg=11&p=189&v=28&ck=101

Oh. Thank you. I guess I was only looking at their consumer line. Would you recommend a Gigabyte server motherboard for a dual Socket R3 build? I don't see any mention of SLI or Thunderbolt support on Gigabyte's site or user manual, and I'm interested in having those features.

Turns out it's hard to find dual Socket R3 support WITH Thunderbolt support! Asus's Thunderbolt EX II and EX II/Dual only support a couple of motherboards, neither is dual R3. And as far as I could tell, Supermicro supports Thunderbolt but only on 3 motherboards, the X10DAX, X10DAi, and X10DAC, and of those only the DAX supports SLI!

So... I'm leaning toward getting the Supermicro X10DAX. Any other advice is appreciated.

 

[trs96]

Oh. Thank you. I guess I was only looking at their consumer line. Would you recommend a Gigabyte server motherboard for a dual Socket R3 build? I don't see any mention of SLI or Thunderbolt support on Gigabyte's site or user manual, and I'm interested in having those features.

Turns out it's hard to find dual Socket R3 support WITH Thunderbolt support! Asus's Thunderbolt EX II and EX II/Dual only support a couple of motherboards, neither is dual R3. And as far as I could tell, Supermicro supports Thunderbolt but only on 3 motherboards, the X10DAX, X10DAi, and X10DAC, and of those only the DAX supports SLI!

So... I'm leaning toward getting the Supermicro X10DAX. Any other advice is appreciated.

Just curious, what will you be doing with those 36 cores and 72 threads of processing power
in one system ? How will you get OS X to run on one of these builds ? Looks like you've been
doing this approach for a while, so anything you could share about this ?

 

[davidahn]

Just curious, what will you be doing with those 36 cores and 72 threads of processing power
in one system ? How will you get OS X to run on one of these builds ? Looks like you've been
doing this approach for a while, so anything you could share about this ?

What am I planning on doing with this machine? Photoshop (editing & printing of photographic banners up to 44" x 120" x 300 dpi x 32 bits), Lightroom (36 MP x 48 bit RAW files, will start processing 16.3 MP x 4-16 image panoramas), and Final Cut Pro (4K video editing). I don't do a high volume of design work, but when I do, I don't want to wait.

Will it work? I hope so. My last dual Xeon build was dual X5620s (2.4 GHz x 4 cores). They were supposed to be X5680's (3.33 GHz x 6 cores) but I got ripped off, and the performance was lackluster, so I took the parts and built a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host and I'm building a new dual Xeon Hackintosh. There is an OS X 32 core result on Geekbench (four processors, 32 cores), so I'm hoping it will work with 18 cores x 2 processors.

 

[trs96]

Must be nice to have that large a budget for a build. If you have success be sure to post
a user build of how you got it going and how it is working. Great to see you will put all of that
hardware to good use.

 

[davidahn]

Must be nice to have that large a budget for a build. If you have success be sure to post
a user build of how you got it going and how it is working. Great to see you will put all of that
hardware to good use.

The wife wasn't happy, but she's mostly over it now. I was THIS close to ordering a maxed out Mac Pro Late 2013, but decided for about 30% more money, I could have 36 cores instead of 12. Can't wait to have the horsepower and unlimited storage after being limited to a 512GB SSD on my MacBook Pro. Also stoked about the new LG 4K monitor; has a huge gamut for photo/video editing.

 

[davidahn]

Updated numbers.

Scaled down the CPUs to E2698v3's to save $1850 total on the build, should still be a monster with 32 cores, 64 threads. Makes it a better price-performance proposition.

Lian Li PC-A71F-B Case $209
Supermicro X10DAX WS Mobo $440
Xeon E5-2698v3 2.3GHz 16 core x 2 $6498
Dual GeForce GTX 780 $1500
Crucial ECC 64GB PC4-2133 4 x 16GB $785
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB x 2 $678
EVGA 1300W PSU $195
TOTALS: $10305

Storage:
RAID Card $429
WD Black 3TB HD x 6 RAID 5 $978
TOTAL: $1407

I separated out the storage array and RAID card because it's not available on a Mac Pro. A Mac Pro outfitted with 12 cores and 3rd party 64GB of ECC RAM would cost $9114. So my Hackintosh build (less RAID) is only 13% more money than a 12-core Mac Pro for 2.67X the cores, hardware RAID, and tons of upgradeability. I would only be able to have 1 channel of Thunderbolt 2.0 rather than 3 like the Mac Pro, but Thunderbolt is less important with 15-20 TB of internal storage.

The WD Black six-drive RAID5 array would offer 15 TB of redundant internal storage offering 935 MB/s write (187 MB/s x 5), 1122 MB/s read (187 MB/s x 6) for under $1000 (not counting the RAID card which is optional). Pretty exciting stuff.

 

[Uwillparish]

Updated numbers.

Scaled down the CPUs to E2698v3's to save $1850 total on the build, should still be a monster with 32 cores, 64 threads. Makes it a better price-performance proposition.

Lian Li PC-A71F-B Case $209
Supermicro X10DAX WS Mobo $440
Xeon E5-2698v3 2.3GHz 16 core x 2 $6498
Dual GeForce GTX 780 $1500
Crucial ECC 64GB PC4-2133 4 x 16GB $785
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB x 2 $678
EVGA 1300W PSU $195
TOTALS: $10305

Storage:
RAID Card $429
WD Black 3TB HD x 6 RAID 5 $978
TOTAL: $1407

I separated out the storage array and RAID card because it's not available on a Mac Pro. A Mac Pro outfitted with 12 cores and 3rd party 64GB of ECC RAM would cost $9114. So my Hackintosh build (less RAID) is only 13% more money than a 12-core Mac Pro for 2.67X the cores, hardware RAID, and tons of upgradeability. I would only be able to have 1 channel of Thunderbolt 2.0 rather than 3 like the Mac Pro, but Thunderbolt is less important with 15-20 TB of internal storage.

The WD Black six-drive RAID5 array would offer 15 TB of redundant internal storage offering 935 MB/s write (187 MB/s x 5), 1122 MB/s read (187 MB/s x 6) for under $1000 (not counting the RAID card which is optional). Pretty exciting stuff.

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

 

[Pellazg]

Do the x10dax is OK for hackintosh running Yosemite?

Hi everybody! I absolutely need 64gb of Ram or even more . I'm working with a very mem hungry sound library by east west so I need a motherboard that can be upgraded, has usb 3 on board etc.

What's about x10dax vs x9dai vs X8DTi E-ATX by supermicro?
What motherboard do you think is at the same time up to date & realistic to make a hackintosh runing yosemite and update it in the future? The fact is that the new trash can by mac is not upgradable, and to my eyes it does not seem like a powerful piece of hardware... and the money to invest is in disproportion with that!

So: supermicro x10dax vs x9dai vs X8DTi E-ATX for a hackintosh workstation? Who wins the race?
Do the x10dax is OK for a hackintosh running yosemite?