I just picked up an E5-1660 with a p9x79-e ws that I thought would be a perfect upgrade to my unRaid box, but I can't for the life of me get the 1060 to be recognized while booting (black screen, vga light on mb, and b2 error code).  I thought this would be a great video card to allow for offloading transcoding, and potential VM duty, but this has been a painful 24 hours.  

 

Has anyone else run into issues like this, and found a resolution?  Looks like my alternative might be to sell the 1060 and go for a 970, as it's closer to the life cycle of the x79 boards.

your CPU and MOBO should be fine for the task

PCIe 3.0 and 40 pcie lanes.

check your manual to see where card placements are supported.

sometimes they use different slot configurations that might not make any sense.

 

i have a 1060 running in my x99 based server. no issues.

alsoo have a 760 in there for plex transcoding.

i am no expert by all means but maybe check out spaceinvader one youtube channel.

watching his videos got me where i am today.

 

 

I fixed the issue, in case anyone else runs into it.  I had to put in an older card to access the bios, but after a full weekend of trying to figure it out, I made sure the 1060 ran ok on another system (win10), with full drivers, and not sure if it updated the fw of the card or not.  Then I forced all of the pci slots to gen3, not auto or gen 2 (auto is default), and it finally accepted the card