I've taken the plunge on a pair of fairly reasonably priced E5-2690 v1 cpus, now to get a board that comes with it. I want IPMI, 6GB/s SAS (currently using SATA, but SAS should provide more backplane/hot swap options, and is compatible), and dual twin slot GPUs , plus at least one other add on card.
I was looking at the Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F-JBOD. I note, however, that there are very reasonably priced second hand 12Gb SAS controllers out there already, and that perhaps it's just as good to get an add in card, if I find a cheaper motherboard with a decent number of slots (6-7). SAS3 is completely backwards compatible with SAS2/SATA, isn't it?
Thoughts? I'm not a fan of Asus because they haven't cared for consumers in the past, or for Intel and their qualified list of PCI-e 3.0 cards. So there's a variety of Supermicro options if I can find them in stock, and there's the Gigabyte GA-7PESH2 (stingy on slots, appears to run them all off one CPU - not happy with that) and the GA-7PESH3 - which is looking good, if expensive (and also very difficult to find), but has normal SAS ports so I'd need to budget another £60 or more for SAS to SAS cables, instead of the mini SAS to SAS cables used and included on most other motherboards.
Sidenote : I'm very impressed by what this person (chune's house build) has done with the GA-7PESH3. Similar to my existing set up, but on steroids. Although when I look at it, the KVM box does not support HDCP..
I was looking at the Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F-JBOD. I note, however, that there are very reasonably priced second hand 12Gb SAS controllers out there already, and that perhaps it's just as good to get an add in card, if I find a cheaper motherboard with a decent number of slots (6-7). SAS3 is completely backwards compatible with SAS2/SATA, isn't it?
Thoughts? I'm not a fan of Asus because they haven't cared for consumers in the past, or for Intel and their qualified list of PCI-e 3.0 cards. So there's a variety of Supermicro options if I can find them in stock, and there's the Gigabyte GA-7PESH2 (stingy on slots, appears to run them all off one CPU - not happy with that) and the GA-7PESH3 - which is looking good, if expensive (and also very difficult to find), but has normal SAS ports so I'd need to budget another £60 or more for SAS to SAS cables, instead of the mini SAS to SAS cables used and included on most other motherboards.
Sidenote : I'm very impressed by what this person (chune's house build) has done with the GA-7PESH3. Similar to my existing set up, but on steroids. Although when I look at it, the KVM box does not support HDCP..