I’ve been looking at Supermicro variants of these boards and they are 2-4x more expensive. I’ve had very good luck with Dell equipment in the past, not bad with HP. However, I’ve recently heard rumors of several vendors (Intel, HP, etc.) pulliing older firmware from their websites; I don’t want to be in a position where I can’t support the board later on.
The CPUs that are driving this search include (both are LGA2011-v3):
Model
Speed
Power
Passmark
Xeon E5-2640 V3
2.60 GHz
90W
13864
Xeon E5-2630 V3
2.40 GHz
85W
12797
Any concerns with these boards for an 8x10tb FreeNAS build? If so, any alternative recommendations?
Their price to performance is based on retail pricing, which isn’t valid in the real world.
Check out our own CPU comparison spreadsheet. We combine data from a bunch of places and put it in one spot.
2011-3 motherboards are more expensive, the CPUs are more expensive, and most importantly you’re forced into using very expensive DDR4. The potential performance gains are minimal compared to builds such as the #builds:anniversary-nsfw.
Interesting… I had seen another spreadsheet, but not this one. Good stuff!
I can def get a good deal on a CPU here. I’d like to try and keep this build to a single CPU vs dual; I’d like to keep heat and noise to a minimum and I was advised on reddit that a dual CPU setup would prob be pretty loud.
If I get one of the dual CPU boards, can I populate only 1 CPU initially? How does that work? Is it specific to the board, or always an option? I have an old Dell precision workstation from 10 years back that I only ordered a single CPU for at the time. Not if/how things have changed…
Yes, you can use a single CPU setup in a dual CPU board.
It may disable some of the PCIe slots or devices, but that’ll be up to the individual board. Some it will have no effect at all.