March 3, 201610 yr People were really helpful when it came to selecting a CPU so I figured I would impose again on getting some help with motherboard selection. I've decided to go with a E3-12xx v5. I haven't decided which one between 1230/1240/1245/1270/1275 but other than performance I assume they are all pretty much equivalent. I've also decided I want to go with ECC. The build is a small NAS (6TB) + a Windows 10 VM for photoshop / indesign use + two headless VMs (a 32-bit Windows XP with minimal specs and a Linux VM to act as a basic internal webserver / web development machine so that I can try stuff on a local machine before making changes to the live sites). No gaming and no transcoding -- I'm building a second unraid machine for media. Using PC Part Picker with LGA1151 + ECC + at least 4 RAM slots I have it down to 9 possible choices. 1) Intel C232 vs Intel C236 -- for some reason I thought I needed C236 but can't find why I thought that -- does it matter? 2) Ethernet posts -- is having 2 helpful? 3) Is there anything else I should know or care about?
March 3, 201610 yr http://ark.intel.com/products/90578/Intel-GL82C232-PCH http://ark.intel.com/products/90594/Intel-GL82C236-PCH I like the look/price of the SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSL series.
March 3, 201610 yr I've decided to go with a E3-12xx v5. I haven't decided which one between 1230/1240/1245/1270/1275 but other than performance I assume they are all pretty much equivalent. There's not even much difference in performance. A BIG difference is whether or not they have embedded Intel HD graphics -- the 1245 and 1275 do; all of the others do not. So you'll either need motherboard graphics; IPMI; or a graphics card with anything except the 1245 or 1275. ... I've also decided I want to go with ECC. Absolutely the right choice. I'd also limit yourself to two installed modules, since the memory is unbuffered. Although with ECC that's less important, since random single bit errors will be corrected. [As I assume you know, the waveform on the address and data buses is significantly degraded when you have a lot of loading on the bus, so it's best to not install more than one module/channel on unbuffered memory systems.] 1) Intel C232 vs Intel C236 -- for some reason I thought I needed C236 but can't find why I thought that -- does it matter? The C236 supports more PCIe lanes (20 vs and has support for Intel HD graphics if you use a CPU with that feature. I'd definitely go with a C236-based board. 2) Ethernet posts -- is having 2 helpful? Depends on whether or not you think you may want to bond the NICs at some point (I've never done this) or if you may want a NIC available to pass-through to a virtual machine, so it can have a dedicated connection. The latter is probably the best reason to have a spare NIC ... but note that this can always be added to a system with an add-in NIC card for $20 or so.
March 3, 201610 yr Author Thanks for the help. The MBD-X11SSL is what I was looking at but wasn't showing up on Part Picker only MBD-X11SSH and MBD-X11SSM and I couldn't find any builds with those on the forums. Good to know only the CPUs ending in 5 have integrated graphics -- that cuts things the choice down to two. I didn't think you could pass integrated graphics to a VM with unraid -- did I misunderstand that? Based on the links nightanole posted the C232 doesn't have VT-d which I believe is essential for pass-through. My plan with the RAM was to get two 16GB sticks of whatever has been tested to work on the motherboard.
March 3, 201610 yr Author From a different thread Note that Skylake CPUs are not recommended for VMs with GPU pass through (harder to isolate the IOMMU groups; no support for the ACS override). Is this a concern?
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