DQ45CB and raid controllers

[OrakelJos]

Has anybody experience with the Intel DQ45CB motherboard and the use of an external raid card like the Areca, Adaptec or 3Ware controllers?
I have read some stories on the Intel forum about boot problems when using raid cards in the PCI-e 1x and 16x on this MB.
Because I want to use this MB with ESXi and using VMDirectPath (which this board supports) with an Areca 1210 this info would be vital for me.
I also want to use pass through on 2 Hauppauge HVR-2200 (European equivalent of the HVR-2250) tuner cards so any comments and/or experience on that are also very welcome

 

[justin2net]

With regards to this post: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2277059

I believe the user did not enable the "show extension card BIOS" feature in the motherboard BIOS. When this is enabled, the banner screens will appear from add-in cards, including NICs and RAID cards.

Also, there IS a way to disable Intel AMT. Go into the AMT bios, hit disable, reboot.

One more thing...ESX(i) will passthrough up to two PCI(e) devices per virtual machine.

 

[OrakelJos]

Thanks, but I read about a different problem. The user was able to use the raid card but after a restart the machine would not boot till the drives were physical disconnected.
I was referring to this post: http://communities.intel.com/message/68208

 

[OrakelJos]

After purchasing the DQ45CB I can confirm that a Perc 5 with the two pin mod is working. Have to sort out a couple of problems with ESXi and file corruption.