I'm not a 'leading edger' and as i'm new to Unraid have purchased a mega cheapo Supermicro X8SIA-F as my 'introduction' to virtualisation. I hope that i've bought well? It looks as though it does everything that i've read about here on the forum. But ... i'm stuck on my choice of CPU for the board? Again from reading up ... Lynnfield processors only - LGA1156. But which one will be the best bang for my buck bearing in mind that i'm writing this on a Pentium 4 2800, approx 8 year machine which is EXTREMELY slow these days and that i'm after a system which will allow me to run a handful of VM's within an Unraid environment with a reasonable amount of responsiveness.  I've alread built two HP Microservers at Unraid 5.0.5 which are working well but feel the need to move on with V6 and virtualisation. Hopefully this board will gve me a couple of years of learning ... any recommendations appreciated. Thanks!

...AFAIR that board has employed some non-intelligent PCIe bridges...not all ports are usable for forwarding with vt-d.

 

I am still using my "old" X8SIL-F with an L3426, which is the low TDP version...but all (L)34xx XEONs will idle at the same rate

You will want to get one with vt-d support....and possibly HT if your budget is not that tight.

 

Edit: just checked the rates on the online shops...man..I should sell mine used and make some money 

Edit2: the quad cores, with or withoiut HT seem to be the sweet spot, if you're going for new ones..

X3430, X3440 and X3450 are the ones, where the X3430 is without HT. The L3406 comes wit HT but also with only 2 real cores...I'd not go with that if budget allows.

Went for a Xeon 3460 in the end ... this rig is just going to be for 'learning' purposes. And, yes ... the board seems to tick all the boxes mentioned regarding passthrough etc.  Still a bit puzzled about the marvel controller issue which i dont understand.

Well now ... i've got my board (X8SIA-F), my cpu (xeon 3460), my case (Fractal Design R2 XL) .... still need to source some memory and importantly a cpu cooler. Anyone any recommendations on a LGA1156 hsf that's up to the job? Once up and running my Unraid 5 will be migrated and then upgraded to 6.0.