I was hoping to have my new build done months ago but money and family matters have slowed things down

 

Besides running unraid and a few dockerised apps, I want to it to be a powerful gaming pc. I still do not know to go the KVM or Xen route. Which is best/most stable for running windoze 7/8?

 

I will more than likely be ordering from www.scan.co.uk

 

These are the ones I have narrowed it down to (mainly due to price):

Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3

Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4

Asus P9X79 Intel X79

 

I like that the Gigabyte have 10 sata ports but I dont know about their quality. What would people recommend?

 

 

Those are all excellent choices - the Gigabyte boards not only have more SATA ports, but also an additional PCIe x16 slot (4 vs. 3 on the Asus) ... although all of them have more than you'll likely need.

 

The build quality for both Asus and Gigabyte is excellent ... I've used many boards from both of them and never had an issue with build quality.

 

Gigabyte boards used to have an issue with adding an HPA to drives as a backup for the BIOS; but I'm fairly certain they no longer do that -- and even if they do, they started a few years ago adding the ability to switch this off in the BIOS (Look for "BIOS Backup" feature -- if it's there, disable it).

 

 

 

Thanks for your response Gary. Ill go with the Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4. It seems like a decent enough board for the money.

 

I was gifted a i7-3930K so im hoping that it will pair up nice with my MB and take care of all my Unraid and gaming needs.

I was gifted a i7-3930K ...

 

You have very nice friends !! 

 

NICE CPU ... that will make a VERY nice system which I'm sure will easily handle anything you want to toss at it [PassMark's CPUMark for that CPU is 12,146 !!]    Not only does it have superb performance, but it also supports both vt-x and vt-d, so you'll have no problem building some very powerful virtual machines if you want to make this a multiple purpose box (and with 6 cores that's a very reasonable thing to do).