Finding the Best Bang for Buck x99 Board. Suggestions Appreciated!

[essjay]

Hi guys....

 

I'm looking for a bit of knowledge from the masses on choosing an X99 board for an unRAID build. Mainly going X99 due to cost and availability of Supermicro boards here in Europe. My current CPU of choice is an E5-2620v3. At this moment in time I see no need for ECC RAM but I do have the option on most X99 boards down the line. To start out with I'll be going with a single stick of 16GB, again due to cost, but I can expand later.

 

So X99 boards. There's 5 that I'm looking at but for now here's my use case:

 

- NAS with 8 storage HDD's.

- I have some spare HDD's that I'll use initially for my VM's. Can swap these out for SSD's as I see/feel the need.

- At maximum I'll need 4 GPU's I think.

- 1 for unRAID itself

- 1 high spec one for a HTPC VM

- 1 low spec one for a not so powerful HTPC VM

- 1 low spec one for desktop VM

 

So I may need up to 4 graphics cards. The boards I'm looking at have between 3 and 5 PCIe 3.0 slots. In the case where there's three 3.0 slots, are there many graphics cards available in PCIe 2.0 x1? A quick look on Amazon didn't reveal any.

 

The next question I have is on the number of NIC's. Some of the cards have 1 others have 2. Is this a major consideration or would I be better off buying a quad Intel Pro/1000 NIC and leave all network functionality to that (I already have a single port Pro/1000 so 2 might be enough for now including the on-board one)? With the amount of data in and out I'll probably need multiple Ethernet ports anyway.

 

Other things I'll hold my hand up and admit I don't fully understand. Like how does each board handle lanes and USB controllers. I'll probably need USB control to 3 VM's.

 

So the boards I'm looking at:

 

- MSI x99a SLI Plus ($250)

- ASRock x99 Extreme 4 ($250)

- ASRock x99 Extreme 6 ($275)

- Asus X99a ($275)

- ASRock x99x Killer (ATX) ($300)

- ASRock x99 WS (a long shot as it's around $70 more expensive)  ($370)

 

Any other considerations I should be looking at? I have to admit the MSI is the most attractive as it's the cheapest and has 4 x PCIe 3.0.

[DoGGyPlanetWoof]

Gigabyte x99P-Sli has all the features and native thunderbolt chip. 10 satas, 4 pcie x16 and pcie sata, usb-c and many more. Nice board I've gotten noproblems. $250 http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16813128885

[HellDiverUK]

Asus X99-A is a nice, simple, stable board.  I'm very, very happy with the one I have in my machine.

[WhiteTowerBlackNode]

On 3/21/2016 at 1:45 PM, HellDiverUK said:

Asus X99-A is a nice, simple, stable board.  I'm very, very happy with the one I have in my machine.

 

Hello HellDiverUK,

 

what settings do you use (if still the current build) to automatically let your X99-A based server boot from the USB drive and not boot into BIOS? I tried various settings, but they didn't work, though I have the X99-A-II, but they probably shouldn't be that different.

 

Thanks for any pointers.