Im planning on getting a Xeon E3 1245v6 and I'm looking for a motherboard. Must meet the following requirements:

 

- Must be able to hold two dual slot graphics cards (1080Ti). These will be passed through to different VMs

- Micro ATX or smaller

- ECC RAM (not sure to what degree this is determined by the motherboard)

- At least 6 SATA ports

- The machine is on 24/7, so presumably some server grade board would be better

 

Any recommendations?

Edited January 21, 20188 yr by Nem

https://pcpartpicker.com/

Are you looking for a board that has dual pciex 16x slots? That’s a tall order for a micro atx board you might be able to find one that has a 16x and an 8x though. 

a 16x and an 8x would be fine for my purposes

The ASRock Rack E3C236D4U appears to meet your requirements and supports your chosen CPU.


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awesome, didnt know ASRock made server boards

 

so originally I was planning on using a riser to plug my 16x graphics card into the 8x slot. I dont think it would fit otherwise?

 

it might be good to have an option without needing a riser, so are there any motherboards that support 2 16x slots if I relax my requirements about motherboard size and allow for an ATX board?

The CPU you have chosen only supports 16 PCIe lanes.  Compare that to the Xeon E5 2670 V2 (a very popular used chip many unRAID users are buying from eBay) which supports 40 PCie lanes.

 

The C236 chipset (like on the ASRock board I mentioned) supports a total of 20 PCIe lanes.  Fortunately, the Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs, like the Xeon E3-1245 v6,  have support for the 4 additional motherboard controlled PCIe lanes, so, you could add an x4 NVMe SSD, for example

 

https://ark.intel.com/products/97473/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1245-v6-8M-Cache-3_70-GHz

 

https://ark.intel.com/products/90594/Intel-C236-Chipset

 

Your two x16 1080TIs would both run in x8 mode even if the board had two x16 slots.  This is true even on boards/CPUs that support more PCIe lanes.

 

The bottom line is that you are unlikely to find any server motherboard in any form factor that has an 1151 socket and the C236 chipset (the most prevalent server chipset for 1151 socket) with two x16 PCie slots because of the number of supported PCIe lanes of the CPU and chipset

 

Server board manufacturers are not thinking, "hey, someone may want to run two high-end gaming graphics cards on their server."

 

You are more likely to find 2 x16 slots on dual socket server motherboards and gaming motherboards. On the latter, you will likely lose ECC support.

Edited January 22, 20188 yr by Hoopster