Dual E5 2670 workstation motherboard recommendation

[Dave_B]

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I went for the "reworked" Intel SC2600CP dual E5-2670 combo from Natex back in November for $350 shipped and it has been 100% stable with the original circa 2011 BIOS it was delivered with and now with the latest BIOS. It's ran right out of the box, has never crashed, hung or locked up, and runs great with a mini GTX 1060 installed in the full-size slot 6 (the top slot). Gaming is actually very smooth since there's very little FPS loss running at PCI-e 2.0 at x8 vs. PCI-e 3.0 at x16. Refer to the link below for details on PCI-e scaling.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 PCI-Express Scaling

It's powered by a Supermicro 665W PSU I picked up for $38 at Microcenter. Libby Hackonson was very helpful during the buying process and Michael Biglen answered my questions regarding doing the BIOS flash on the "reworked" Intel SC2600CP motherboard. The combo cost less than a single i7 6800 CPU without any motherboard or RAM had I decided to go for a single-socket LGA 2011 V3 rig. So I'm very satisfied with my Natex purchase.

 

[zanechua]

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I went for the "reworked" Intel SC2600CP dual E5-2670 combo from Natex back in November for $350 shipped and it has been 100% stable with the original circa 2011 BIOS it was delivered with and now with the latest BIOS. It's ran right out of the box, has never crashed, hung or locked up, and runs great with a mini GTX 1060 installed in the full-size slot 6 (the top slot). Gaming is actually very smooth since there's very little FPS loss running at PCI-e 2.0 at x8 vs. PCI-e 3.0 at x16. Refer to the link below for details on PCI-e scaling.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 PCI-Express Scaling

It's powered by a Supermicro 665W PSU I picked up for $38 at Microcenter. Libby Hackonson was very helpful during the buying process and Michael Biglen answered my questions regarding doing the BIOS flash on the "reworked" Intel SC2600CP motherboard. The combo cost less than a single i7 6800 CPU without any motherboard or RAM had I decided to go for a single-socket LGA 2011 V3 rig. So I'm very satisfied with my Natex purchase.

I have some questions as I'm running an almost similar build to yours I believe.

How is USB on your board and can you use sleep?

I assume you are running Windows 10?

 

[wildpig1234]

I have some questions as I'm running an almost similar build to yours I believe.

How is USB on your board and can you use sleep?

I assume you are running Windows 10?

Sleep does work with S2600cp. But on mine, I have to disable allow wake up for all keyboards and mouses inside windows and wake it up with the power button. If i don't disable the wake up for keyboards and mouses, it would act very weird like it wants to come out of sleep immediately when it powers down and then becomes unresponsive for like 1 min before finally sleep for real. With keyboard and mouses diabled for wake up from sleep, it goes into sleep immediately without any problem. Be aware even sleeping will use about 17W, probably due to presence of IPMI remote management.

 

[eholyst]

I found this thread and just wanted to add my experience here. I purchased this EPC602D8A board several months ago worked fine on 8.1 and 7. I upgraded it to 10 and would get random BSOD and lockups. It took me months of clean installs and full image backups and restores to track down the problem. I don't know if this is the same issue others are seeing but this is what it turned out to be for me. Windows 10 was installing it's own Intel Manangment Interface and Intel Watchdog drivers. I found this out by disabling Windows 10 driver installs automatically and running the windows update minitool to look at what it was installing. Once I disabled those two drivers everything has been running perfect for months.

 

[zanechua]

I found this thread and just wanted to add my experience here. I purchased this EPC602D8A board several months ago worked fine on 8.1 and 7. I upgraded it to 10 and would get random BSOD and lockups. It took me months of clean installs and full image backups and restores to track down the problem. I don't know if this is the same issue others are seeing but this is what it turned out to be for me. Windows 10 was installing it's own Intel Manangment Interface and Intel Watchdog drivers. I found this out by disabling Windows 10 driver installs automatically and running the windows update minitool to look at what it was installing. Once I disabled those two drivers everything has been running perfect for months.

This actually might be something that is affecting sleep. I'll try it. Thanks for this note.

 

[znd125]

I found this thread and just wanted to add my experience here. I purchased this EPC602D8A board several months ago worked fine on 8.1 and 7. I upgraded it to 10 and would get random BSOD and lockups. It took me months of clean installs and full image backups and restores to track down the problem. I don't know if this is the same issue others are seeing but this is what it turned out to be for me. Windows 10 was installing it's own Intel Manangment Interface and Intel Watchdog drivers. I found this out by disabling Windows 10 driver installs automatically and running the windows update minitool to look at what it was installing. Once I disabled those two drivers everything has been running perfect for months.

Thank you for sharing this information.

 

[cm.graz]

I'm looking to run a Dual E5-2670 setup. I'll be upgrading my unRAID server.

My primary purposes will be to run 10-20 dockers, multiple simultaneous plex transcodes, as well as a few VMs, including Win10. I don't do any heavy gaming.

I'm having a hard time justifying not going with a natex package. $575 + S&H for dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs, an Intel 2600CP2J motherboard, & 64 GB PC3-12800 RAM.

Is there anything critical I'm missing out on by not going with something like the ASUS Z9PA-D8 or the ASRock EP2C602?

 

[SamDabbers]

I'm having a hard time justifying not going with a natex package. $575 + S&H for dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs, an Intel 2600CP2J motherboard, & 64 GB PC3-12800 RAM.

Is there anything critical I'm missing out on by not going with something like the ASUS Z9PA-D8 or the ASRock EP2C602?

It's a really good deal if you want lots of cores/threads, RAM, and/or PCIe slots. The motherboard is picky about enabling PCIe gen 3 with E5 v1 CPUs (there's a whitelist for certified cards; defaults to PCIe gen 2), and the fan control will need to be tuned if you're not using an Intel chassis, but that's about it.

I went with an Intel P4000M chassis and cooling solution to avoid having to tinker too much with the fans, and can definitely recommend it. Hint: use the best offer button!