A question. I am buying a Haswell Xeon e3 mobo. I want an LSI 2008 for ZFS and Solaris. I have a IBM M1015 card, which is PCIe 2.0 x8. I also want a decent gaming graphics card, and they all use x16 PCIe slots. So I need to use one LSI 2008 card and I need to use a gaming card. I game only occasionally, and then I reboot into Windows. My question is, which mobo should I buy? I would prefer a mobo with as many x16 PCIe 3.0 slots as possible. This means I should opt for an ATX mobo, because they have more expansion slots.
If i buy an ATX Supermicro X10SAT which has three PCIe 16 slots, I get one active x16 PCIe slot, or two active x8 PCIe slots. But I can not get two active x16 slots at the same time. This means if I insert the M1015 card in an x8 slot, then the PCIe slots will degrade to x8 speed (or lower if I populate three PCIe slots). Right? So no slot will run at x16 speed. (But gaming cards never use more band width than x8 anyway).
Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10SAT
My other alternative is the microATX Supermicro X10SL7-F mobo which has an built in LSI2308 controller. I hope it works as well as LSI2008 on Solaris. But this mobo has only one PCIe 3.0 x8 speed. No x16 slots are available. This means I can not run my graphics card at x16 speed, I can only use x8 speed.
Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10SL7-F
So no matter which mobo I choose I can not get x16 PCIe slots. Is this correct? So I can choose any mobo I want? Unless I can run the M1015 in PCI-E 2.0 x1 (in x4) slots which the X10SAT has. Can I run the M1015 in a smaller x1 slot in the X10SAT and give up some bandwidth? Or must I use the M1015 card in an x8 slot?
Or do you have any other suggestion? I want as many x16 slots as possible, and LSI2008 or LSI2308 card, and gaming card. And Solaris and ZFS.