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I don't know. They might not be running in traditional motherboards. But in open compute motherboards like this.

I think there will be plenty more cheap e5's being dumped on ebay. It's the sandy bridge motherboards that I would worry about getting. Afaik they aren't making any more so whatever left out there is it. Get one while you can... As more people find out about this deal it will only drive prices on the boards up. Same thing happened with x58, only that was probably worse because the Westmere xeons are overclockable.

I haven't bothered with seagate archive drives. I've got a 24 bay norco chassis so it's just not necessary. It's not like i'm running out of bays or anything. All my drives are 4tb reds, but I did just buy my first 4tb hgst nas drive, I had to try one just to see what all the fuss is about.

Agreed. For workstation boards there are probably better choices. They sell a few different workstation boards but i've never owned one. I wasn't aware that there was a sleep issue, sorry.

I tend to buy supermicro boards over any of the others if it's going in a server. The E5-2670 @ 2.6Ghz isn't the best gaming cpu. It will work but there are better (higher clocked) chips to buy if you are serious about gaming on it. Sata3 = 6 gbps. So basicly sata3 is sata6. Thanks Tums. I mistakenly typed SATA3/6. Most of the boards I have looked at support more SATA2 versus SATA3 ports. As said before it probably doesn't matter as you can allocate PCIE SATA3 cards if you want to take advantage of the faster SATA3 connections. I run a i7-5820K right now for gaming so don't think that makes me a serious gamer but I do tend to purchase the better GPU's on the market every few years. So far my current gaming rig runs all games at the Highest settings although there might be a few out there that will force me to run it a notch lower. For me being able to develop a Windows Lab environment would be much more important than gaming so I can see where the extra memory and cores could be beneficial. My current Unraid box has an i5 3570K so putting together this Xeon setup will definitely exceed my gaming PC. Passmark for my 5820K is ~13000 and the Xeon 2670 is ~12500/dual is ~18500. I'd say that would be better than my gaming rig unless I am missing something else. For games it's not about overall performance, most games only use 1-2 threads and run better with higher clock speeds as opposed to more cores. Your 5820k is clocked @ 3.3ghz. so you should definitely get better performance in gaming with it, how much I don't know. All I can say is try it. You always have the 5820k to game on if you need to.

I tend to buy supermicro boards over any of the others if it's going in a server. The E5-2670 @ 2.6Ghz isn't the best gaming cpu. It will work but there are better (higher clocked) chips to buy if you are serious about gaming on it. Sata3 = 6 gbps. So basicly sata3 is sata6.

Get the XL R2 if you must use a tower.

Just for the record it was absolutely a bad SATA port on the MB. I put in a replacement board this morning and everything is working fine now.

Either one is fine. Just find a US seller that has good feedback. If you have a newer board with efi shell that's how you're going to want to flash. I think you still want to run the megarec command in dos though, and then do the actual flashing in efi shell.

Thanks RobJ. I have 4 drives connecting to the onboard Intel ports (4 SATA ports to SAS backplane - reverse breakout cable) . Only 1 of those drives is showing problems. I've already switched to a new cable and i'm still getting errors. I will be replacing this motherboard I just got just to rule that part out. I have moved everything over to my LSI controllers just in case. It's nice to know that this isn't going to cause any data corruption.

Got more errors last night. See attached log file error .txt. SMART shows UDMA CRC jumped from 5 to 7 on that drive That's it!!!! I'm shutting everything down and all my array drives are going on the LSI controllers!!! error_message.txt error_message.txt

Thank you for posting that beardedpants. So this might be just an intel controller issue. I honestly don't think my motherboard is bad but i'm going to change it anyway since I already have a replacement on the way. Those BadCRC error warnings in the log seem to have gone away, at least for now after I shut everything down and rebooted the server. I've only seen a couple of them so far so it's hopefully not a big deal. The WD red 4TB drive that's showing 5 CRC errors is like over a year old so it's not really that bad for it being that old but i'm pretty sure all those errors happened recently after I changed my motherboard. I ran a full SMART test on the drive today and it's fine. I'm probably going to just start running LSI/IBM 1015 cards for my 24 array drives and save the onboard intel ports for SSD cache and vm drives.

I wouldn't bother with it for gaming. For 3D rendering and video production yeah, but not gaming. It would make a good windows workstation only if you're running software that uses lots of cores/threads.

Unfortunately my other board has already been sold. I will call newegg and ask for a replacement MB (Supermicro X10SLH-F). Hopefully this fixes things. If not, I will try switching backplanes next. Thank you!

I just changed to a different motherboard the other day and all of a sudden i'm starting to get BadCRC errors, the log is showing "interface failure errors" on one of my drives. I've got 1 drive now showing UDMA CRC error count of 5. I've re-seated the cable and have also tried changing to a different reverse breakout cable to my backplane. Should I blame this on a bad onboard SATA controller and send the motherboard back for replacement? I really don't want to be stuck with it if there is a chance it is bad. I still have about 20 days left for a refund. I just find this too much of a coincidence. My other board was performing with no problems and I was having no issues. It's just the onboard SATA causing problems. I've got a IBM 1015 with a bunch of other drives running from it and they are all fine. Thank you!

It's great if that's what you're after.. My next board is going to be the complete opposite of small form factor. I'm wanting as many pci-e expansion slots as I can get. I've got a mostly empty kvm switch sitting here and I'd like to do gpu passthough to at least 2 or 3 vm's.

Yes, I am sure there is a real story behind all this. Some bankruptcy server farm liquidation. Way too many of these hitting the market all at once. Classic economics 101 "law of supply and demand" Wonder how long the prices will be so depressed? Facebook upgraded all of the servers in their data centers, so these flooded the market. It's happened before, with the X5600 series Xeons a few years ago. I'm still running one. Westmere-EP xeon x5660, paid $90 for it. OC'ed to 4.2Ghz. Over 11k passmark.

Save yourself the trouble and give in already. You know you will eventually [emoji6] You're probably right, i'll probably end up with a dual cpu rig. It's just too tempting.... They've been dropping like a rock in price since October, they were up around $170, now they're less than $70 each. Maybe 3 more months from now they'll be giving them away.

It was a joke. nevermind.... I'm basicly looking for excuses not to buy one.

That's a good reason for me not to buy one then... Until I can find someone that will package correctly.

Yeah, i've found that as long as it's in the correct file format for plex to be able to direct play you really don't need much cpu power. I usually use .mkv for pretty much everything these days.

I'm not sure about cpu recommendations but for ram, yeah just get ddr3 1600. 1866 is completely unnecessary.

Depends on what bitrate it is recorded at. I record at 8 Mbps 1080i on my hauppauge colossus 2 from dish network and I can direct play the video via plex app (experimental setting) over to my Galaxy S6, the audio still needs to be transcoded but it takes very little processing power. Even 30+Mbps blurays rips (.mkv 25 GB files) I find that I am able to direct play the video portion of the movie on my 1 GbE network. If you can't direct play (i.e. not in the correct file format for plex), the standard answer is I think between 2000-3000 passmark for high bitrate movies.

Will AMD cards work then? I run headless ipmi with no graphics cards. Do you think a Radeon HD 5870 would work in the primary graphics slot? I'm wanting to do gpu pass through to a linux mint vm. I think the IPMI actually has a graphics controller, so unraid should be fine using that and allowing pass through. Do you have an ASPEED graphics card listed in the VM GUI? If so, that's the IPMI card. Yes, the Aspeed is listed there. So I guess I could actually use an nvidia card then if I wanted? Yep. It works for me at least. Thanks, that's really good news. I've been running linux mint mate 17.3 vm for awhile now but it's been painful just using xrdp.

Will AMD cards work then? I run headless ipmi with no graphics cards. Do you think a Radeon HD 5870 would work in the primary graphics slot? I'm wanting to do gpu pass through to a linux mint vm. I think the IPMI actually has a graphics controller, so unraid should be fine using that and allowing pass through. Do you have an ASPEED graphics card listed in the VM GUI? If so, that's the IPMI card. Yes, the Aspeed is listed there. So I guess I could actually use an nvidia card then if I wanted?