I've been having some issues with a E3-1230 + X9SCM-F-O setup that I've been trying out lately, and feel pretty limited by the 8x slots and lack of 16x's. The board in particular is pretty good, but I've had really odd peculiarities with which slots work with what card, and it did not want to play nicely at all with a 8x-->16x riser for pcie VGA (hardware in general, not even talking passthrough).
After throwing up my hands one too many times with guessing which slot would work with what card, I'm leaning towards swapping platforms. I like the value of the Xeon 1230, but ideally would like to get VGA passthrough working (yes, I know it's not even close to perfect, but it's at least more likely now than it used to be) among other pci-e cards, and the selections are somewhat sparse for Xeon 1155 platform, not in any small part due to the limited pcie lanes.
In contrast, the 40+ lanes on a desktop 990fx make it pretty appealing, but I'm concerned about its compatibility under esxi 5 and/or xen, as well as performance of the 8120 for vm's as opposed to sb. This isn't necessarily for critical applications, so the lack of ecc isn't the end of the world. Anyone have current experience with passthrough on amd, and can comment on pros/cons? The newer bioses for some of the boards like the CH-V or gigabyte UD7/5 look promising, but it's hard to find cohesive answers about this.
After throwing up my hands one too many times with guessing which slot would work with what card, I'm leaning towards swapping platforms. I like the value of the Xeon 1230, but ideally would like to get VGA passthrough working (yes, I know it's not even close to perfect, but it's at least more likely now than it used to be) among other pci-e cards, and the selections are somewhat sparse for Xeon 1155 platform, not in any small part due to the limited pcie lanes.
In contrast, the 40+ lanes on a desktop 990fx make it pretty appealing, but I'm concerned about its compatibility under esxi 5 and/or xen, as well as performance of the 8120 for vm's as opposed to sb. This isn't necessarily for critical applications, so the lack of ecc isn't the end of the world. Anyone have current experience with passthrough on amd, and can comment on pros/cons? The newer bioses for some of the boards like the CH-V or gigabyte UD7/5 look promising, but it's hard to find cohesive answers about this.
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