JustJoshin

The case says it fits E-ATX so it should fit. The Thermaltake definitely has A LOT more room but honestly, I think it's just going to be too big. It's a massive case and upon further review, larger than I expected. Although I love all the options it brings. Ok fair enough ram in the package might be easier. I thought I may have been able to source some on ebay cheaper given I'm paying an exchange rate on that ram from natex. I noticed the dimms are slightly different in the different packages. Is there much difference in speed etc. that I would actually notice? I'm leaning towards the 64GB package just to shave the cost down a bit as it's in USD and I still have a lot of other things to buy. I had a feeling the natex heatsinks wouldn't be enough. I'll have to have a look around for some cheap but decent 2011 heatsink/fans then. I have a pretty good noctua on my current 2600k but I don't know where the LGA attachment is for it. If anyone has any suggests on 2011 heatsink/fan combos I'd still love to hear them! Can you elaborate on this a bit? Not sure what you mean by this. Thanks for the feedback so far cranch.

I am planning on going with http://www.natex.us. Even with exchange rate and heft delivery it still appears to be pretty good value. I haven't seen any e-atx boards in Australia under $600 for the motherboard alone. On their order page it doesn't have Australia listed as a country to ship to but I have been in contact with their support staff over email and they said they do ship to Australia. Additionally, when I inquired about the shipping fee the person I spoke with sent me the following: Postage Price Calculator International Services Large Package, weight 12 lb 0 oz (5.443 kg) to Australia Priority Mail Express International™ $133.70 USD (3-6 business days to many major markets) Priority Mail International® $99.15 USD (6 - 10 business days to many major markets) Now that I have settled on a motherboard and the purpose of this thread I am marking this as solved and continuing the overal build discussion in this thread (https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=48750.0 ). Feel free to stop by and share your thoughts

Hi guys, After narrowing down on a few different design considerations in some other threads and reading through other people's similar builds I am ready to put together my own build and would appreciate some advice / critique. I have seen a couple of people say good things about the natex kits. It also appears to be one of the cheapest and easiest way to get an e-atax dual socket mobo to AUS. Purpose / Usage - Plex - Transmission - Couch Potato - Sick Rage - NAS Duties (above + file sharing etc.) -- Virtualised win 10 environment for wife -- Virtualised win 10 development machine / gaming Shopping Case: - https://www.pccasegear.com/products/23956/corsair-carbide-air-540-high-airflow-atx-cube-case ($185) OR - https://www.pccasegear.com/products/30397/thermaltake-core-x9-e-atx-cube-chassis ($235) Motherboard / CPU: http://www.natex.us/product-p/s2600cp-cpu-kit.htm (~$550AUD delivered) Heatsinks: ?? (Question: Are the passive heatsinks you can get from natex with good case airflow and fans enough since you can't overclock xeons or are 3rd party heatsink / fans still required?) I was hoping to not have to spend $200 on i4 noctua coolers if I don't have too. RAM: ?? Second sound card: ?? Already Own Power Supply:1kw modular Cougar power supply Parity: 4 TB HGST Array: 4 TB HGST Video Cards: 2 x R9 280x Cache: 500GB 840 evo, 250 GB OCZ Agility (version 3 I think can't remember) Sound Cards: I have one pcie xonar dg laying around. not sure what I'll do for the other one. Maybe usb? Does this look like a reasonable build? What do people recommend for some cheap ECC ram. 32 or 64GB and heatsinks?

I'm still interested if anyone has any motherboard recommendations for a dual E5-2670 setup? I did come across this package ( http://www.natex.us/product-p/s2600cp-cpu-kit.htm ) which is interesting. With shipping to AUS it comes in at around $550. It is a little light on 6GB sata connectors. I'd like to potentially allow room for 3 video cards for vm's so it doesn't leave a lot (if any) room for additional expansion cards.

Thanks for deciphering the naming convention! I wasn't aware of that. It looks as if there are very few options with a base clock of 3Ghz that can be picked up for a reasonable price.

Good spot! I thought most / all xeons could run dual configuration. Those bastards! I haven't purchased anything yet. Still weighing up my options. Cheers,

As jonathanm said, but just to add some additional info as vt-x is usually supported. More specifically, vt-d is commonly disabled in early ES (engineering samples). Also, you might like to consider that as DX 12 games become more prevalent throughout later this year and beyond they will be wanting to use more cores. This is good as it will scale with a processor that has more cores but will subsequently cause the chip to not turbo as high. If a gaming vm is a high priority you might like to consider something with a higher clock speed (at least 3Ghz). In the newer chips these cost quite a lot more. I'm currently thinking about building at dual socket E5-1660 (http://ark.intel.com/products/64620/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1660-15M-Cache-3_30-GHz-0_0-GTs-Intel-QPI). These 6 core cpus have a base clock of 3.3Ghz and turbo to 3.9Ghz. With two of these you still have plenty of cores for running vm's, transcoding and other tasks whilst still having a decent clock speed for games.

Update: This is probably the closest I have found so far although it is lacking in sata 3 ports (only has 2). http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-X9DRi-LN4F-ServerMotherboard-Dual-LGA-2011-Socket-R-W-Heatsinks-3A/131773771450?_trksid=p2047675.c100011.m1850&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D36499%26meid%3D058e8935f7044d099f7e8ae8937a8816%26pid%3D100011%26rk%3D5%26rkt%3D7%26sd%3D222050604545

With the price of older xeons coming down I started looking around for dual socket motherboads. Can anybody recommend any dual socket boards for E5-1650 / 1660, preferably ATX, that are around $500/ $600 AUD? Something like this would have been nice but it's 2011-3 (https://freeshippingtech.com.au/index.php?z=p&p=MBDSPM10201&qr=fst_getprice&utm_source=getprice&utm_medium=cpc). Any help would be much appreciated guys. Cheers. EDIT: Upon be informed that the 1660 can't be put into a dual configuration I am now looking at the 2670.

It seems like passing ssds through unassigned is the peoples choice. Cheers!

Thanks for the link TiHKAL. I had actually already watched that one but re-watching it again didn't hurt In the video he essentially adds both ssd's to the cache and then adds a vidsk user share set to cache only. This sounds like Option 2) I listed above. There is no way to control which physical ssd it goes to in this scenario so it seems possible both vms could exist on the same ssd within the cache? And this was basically what I was asking. Performance wise it would be more performant to have each vm on a different physical disk. Is there anyone that has gone with an alternate setup (like option 1 or something different? Be keen to see what options are available.

I'm interested to know what are the best options for setting up vm's when using ssd's. In my unraid build I am planning to have two windows 10 vm's and games on ssd's other stuff on hdd's. Option 1) 250GB ssd dedicated for (Vm1) 250GB ssd dedicated for (Vm2) 500GB cache (with games partition set to always) 4 TB HDD (Array) 4 TB HDD (Parity) Option 2) Put all ssd drives in the cache Create user shares for the vm's so that each vm is on a different 250GB ssd and then all remaining space is automatically available for cache. 4 TB HDD (Array) 4 TB HDD (Parity)

I have enabled virtualisation yes but had completely forgotten about vt-d (my current chip doesn't support it). Nevermind, I picked up an i5 2500 that has vt-d support to test with. Thanks for reminding me of the vt-d requirement!

I have a Z77X D3H motherboard (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4144#ov) whose onboard audio does not show up to pass through when creating a windows 10 vm (neither does the 280x gpu hdmi for that matter either). Am I completely out of luck or is there something I can do to make unraid aware of the onboard audio? I guess the kernel doesn't have a driver loaded for what looks to be VIA VT2021 codec?

Thanks for the update. Encouging to know that I can probably get it working when I build my new x99 when the new broadwell-e comes out.

Have you had time to play around with it yet? How is the performance and latency vs metal?

With the Oculus Rift delays I doubt there are many people that have received them yet....and of those are there any running unraid? Has anybody heard any word from the unraid team as to whether or not they plan on getting one to test support / compatibility within a windows 10 vm? I have one on order but it won't be arriving until July Anybody else have an oculus rift or htc vive on order?

Glad to know crossfire is working for the newer cards that use don't require the hardware bridge. Very useful. Thanks.

Are ok. No worries. Since I will be running plex and a few other things it isn't ideal. My wife may want to watch t.v for example if I'm gaming. It may however be a last resort / fallback option as I plan to get an Oculus Rift and I haven't heard anything about compatibility with unraid yet. Technically it's just usb and gpu pass through so should work fine but it is as they say, untested.

That's a very good point. I had completely forgotten about that. I'm going to upgrade to a single Polaris 10 card (490x?) when they are out and later down the line maybe I'll add a second one for crossfire. Hopefully by then crossfire will be working in unraid if it isn't already (using the inherent pcie bridge).

Neither am I. But it would be nice to have. I tried crossfire with my two R9 280X, but it didn't work. I could install the drivers and it would enable crossfire, but as soon as I ran 3D Mark the VM crashed. This was last year, so haven't tried it in newer version. Thanks saarg. Good to know. I don't suppose you still have the means to test this to see if things have changed any?

Neither am I. But it would be nice to have. I'm not. I plan on running two win10 installations for gaming (one for myself and one for myself), passing a gpu through to each vm. Sometimes however when my wife isn't using the vm it would be nice to have the option to shut it down and pass that second gpu through to my vm for crossfire. Additionally, I'm coming from FreeNAS so I'm not sure how unraid handles plugins like plex / transmission / couch potato etc. Are these dockers in unraid?? If anybody could point me towards some links to go read for setting up the aforementioned in unraid I'd be extremely grateful. I didn't mention this in my original post. So basically I plan to run two gaming vm's and a couple of plugins / dockers. One board I am currently looking at is the MSI X99A Gaming 7 Motherboard. It has a good onboard audio chip I'd like to pass through to my vm and a good pcie layout with room for expansion. That's a good idea. Had forgotten about the on board usb headers! aside: I currently have 280x crossfire in my current machine but plan on selling a 280x and using the remaining one in my wife's vm and buying myself a Polaris 10 when they come out (I do more gaming than my wife

Just thought I'd chime in as I plan to do almost exactly the same thing as the op so will be watching this thread very closely. I have a few related questions. I hope that's ok. Not trying to hijack the thread or anything. Hopefully it just provides a bit more general information towards an almost identical build. I'm planning to build a new 8 core broadwell-e HEDT cpu running two win 10 vm's with an amd card to each one (with the option of running xfire on my vm if the other one is switched off). Is this possible? With amd cards can you run unraid headless thus not needing a 3rd video card? And lastly, what's the best solution to get audio/mouse/keyboard to each of the vm's (the OP might already know this for his build?). Can onboard audio be passed through to one vm so a second sound card would be required for the other vm or possibly audio over gpu hdmi. I'm aware that it can be easier to pass through entire usb groups but depending on how they are configured this isn't always doable on some motherboards. Can individual usb be passed through? In general, when doing crossfire and needing double width slots it can be difficult to find boards with enough expansion space for additional usb hubs and audio. I'm really interested in this build and look forward to see more updates PowerJunkie!

As this is a test machine I only have a 4gig stick in there. I allocated 2gig to the windows vm.

Tried the previous 112 virtio driver but still nothing showing up when selecting w10->amd64 from the load driver dialog. Any ideas?