July 1, 201511 yr Hi, I have an unraid server currently up and running but my motherboard and cpu don't support IOMMU. I would like to upgrade both my motherboard and cpu to ones that support vt-d and IOMMU. I currently have an AMD cpu but I would like to change to intel. Could anyone recommend a good motherboard and cpu. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. P.S. I am on a very tight budget right now and don't need anything too fancy.
July 2, 201511 yr Performance, power efficiency, and value seem to be best on the Haswell LGA1150 platform. Idle power consumption is low but the chips deliver top performance at various price levels. If you don't have a discrete video card, then for under $300 you can go with: Asrock H97M Pro4 motherboard and an i5-4590 CPU. If you have a video card, you could move up to a Xeon E3 (has no onboard video) such as a Xeon E3-1231v3 for a total of about $325 (based on Newegg prices) The H97 has limited SATA ports, so you may want to consider a server oriented motherboard such as Asrock E3C224 or Supermicro MBD-X10SLM-F-O. Lots of folks on these forums have put together systems using motherboards from both manufacturers. You can easily replace your mobo and cpu for under $500 and get a damn fine system. All of the above though are DDR3 1600 systems. I suspect they will all work just fine with your existing memory, and probably to a level where you could never detect a difference between 1600 and 1333 MHz. Final note, you can mess with this web page and filter out processors based on specific features you are looking for: http://ark.intel.com/Search/Advanced?s=t Once you have a motherboard targeted, do some google searches to see how much success folks have with virtualization.
July 3, 201511 yr Performance, power efficiency, and value seem to be best on the Haswell LGA1150 platform. Idle power consumption is low but the chips deliver top performance at various price levels. If you don't have a discrete video card, then for under $300 you can go with: Asrock H97M Pro4 motherboard and an i5-4590 CPU. If you have a video card, you could move up to a Xeon E3 (has no onboard video) such as a Xeon E3-1231v3 for a total of about $325 (based on Newegg prices) The H97 has limited SATA ports, so you may want to consider a server oriented motherboard such as Asrock E3C224 or Supermicro MBD-X10SLM-F-O. Lots of folks on these forums have put together systems using motherboards from both manufacturers. You can easily replace your mobo and cpu for under $500 and get a damn fine system. All of the above though are DDR3 1600 systems. I suspect they will all work just fine with your existing memory, and probably to a level where you could never detect a difference between 1600 and 1333 MHz. Final note, you can mess with this web page and filter out processors based on specific features you are looking for: http://ark.intel.com/Search/Advanced?s=t Once you have a motherboard targeted, do some google searches to see how much success folks have with virtualization. I would just like to point out, this is the exact combo I decided in... ASRock H97 Pro4 and a E3-1231v3. I haven't built it yet so I can't speak on how it runs... But I've got high hopes...
July 3, 201511 yr Author Performance, power efficiency, and value seem to be best on the Haswell LGA1150 platform. Idle power consumption is low but the chips deliver top performance at various price levels. If you don't have a discrete video card, then for under $300 you can go with: Asrock H97M Pro4 motherboard and an i5-4590 CPU. If you have a video card, you could move up to a Xeon E3 (has no onboard video) such as a Xeon E3-1231v3 for a total of about $325 (based on Newegg prices) The H97 has limited SATA ports, so you may want to consider a server oriented motherboard such as Asrock E3C224 or Supermicro MBD-X10SLM-F-O. Lots of folks on these forums have put together systems using motherboards from both manufacturers. You can easily replace your mobo and cpu for under $500 and get a damn fine system. All of the above though are DDR3 1600 systems. I suspect they will all work just fine with your existing memory, and probably to a level where you could never detect a difference between 1600 and 1333 MHz. Final note, you can mess with this web page and filter out processors based on specific features you are looking for: http://ark.intel.com/Search/Advanced?s=t Once you have a motherboard targeted, do some google searches to see how much success folks have with virtualization. Thank you for the helpful info. The Asrock E3C224 and the Xeon E3-1231v3 seem like a great combo and I would like to go with them. However, I cant seem to find anything confirming IOMMU support on these. I can see here (http://ark.intel.com/products/80910/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1231-v3-8M-Cache-3_40-GHz) that Vt-x is supported but I'm not quite sure where to check for IOMMU support.
July 30, 201510 yr The H97 has limited SATA ports, so you may want to consider a server oriented motherboard such as Asrock E3C224 ... I'm confused. The specs for H97M Pro4 are: 6 x SATA 6Gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157512 And the E3C224 is: 2 x SATA 3.0Gb/s + 4 x SATA 6.0Gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157404&cm_re=E3C224-_-13-157-404-_-Product So how does the H97 have limited SATA ports? And what else would justify nearly double the price for the E3C224? Thanks, Richard
July 30, 201510 yr The H97 has limited SATA ports, so you may want to consider a server oriented motherboard such as Asrock E3C224 ... I'm confused. The specs for H97M Pro4 are: 6 x SATA 6Gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157512 And the E3C224 is: 2 x SATA 3.0Gb/s + 4 x SATA 6.0Gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157404&cm_re=E3C224-_-13-157-404-_-Product So how does the H97 have limited SATA ports? And what else would justify nearly double the price for the E3C224? Thanks, Richard SATA: 2 x SATA 3.0Gb/s + 4 x SATA 6.0Gb/s Additional SATA Marvell SE9172: 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s
July 30, 201510 yr Additional SATA Marvell SE9172: 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Thanks. I knew I was confused. Two extra SATA2 connectors seems like not a great deal, particularly because I can the the H97M Pro4 for nearly $100 less.
July 30, 201510 yr The E3C224 also has dual LAN and IPMI. I offered it as an example of a server oriented board based on its popularity in many threads. Myself, I am quite happy with the H97M Pro I have on my desktop. When (not if, but when :-) I build a new unRAID server I may be looking for those features. That's why I threw it out for consideration.
July 30, 201510 yr Author Sorry for not posting this sooner. Just wanted to update you guys and say that my budget changed a little bit so I went with the Asrock H97M Pro4 motherboard and i5-4590 CPU recommended by Chugiak. My system has been up and running for a while now and I couldn't be happier (okay, maybe if I had the money to buy a motherboard with IPMI- but never mind). This covered all my virtualization problems and works great! Thanks everyone.
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