Best value dual LGA-2011 motherboard for GPU (ML, video)?

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polyfractal

Member
Apr 6, 2016
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So I have a small cluster of OpenCompute nodes (LGA-2011 boards, mixture of xeon E5-2670 and E5-2650L V2, oodles of DDR3 RAM) which I use for a variety of compute-heavy tasks. I love them. But they aren't great for anything involving graphics/GPU. I can just barely get them to use an old ATI Radeon HD6350, and even then support is dicey and modern video editing software refuses to use it (e.g. Premiere Pro).

I'd like to pilfer the CPU/RAM/HDD from one of the nodes and move it to a dual LGA-2011 CPU motherboard that supports modern GPUs, and a sizable amount of RAM. I'd like to use it for video editing and perhaps some light deep-learning tasks in the near future. So one GPU to start, and maybe expansion for another one or two in the future. Which I believe means I need PCIe slots that support 75w, correct?

Bonus points if I can rack mount the whole mess, but a tower on a shelf is fine too.

Is there a current goto for best value system that ticks these boxes? Or a particular motherboard that I can use as a base?

I'm not opposed to investigating an entirely new system with more recent hardware, but since I already have a glut of LGA-2011 hardware it seemed like a good fit.
 

polyfractal

Member
Apr 6, 2016
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To answer myself, a few folks elsewhere recommended I checkout Dell R7610's, as well as R720's (with the gpu power expansion cable)
 

Roy68

Member
Apr 13, 2016
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I've not had any issues using Intel S2600CP board with GTX 1070 GPU and 2 x E5-2680 V2s, and before that E5-2670 V1s. There's quite a lot of these boards on used market.