Gigabyte X79S-UP5-Wifi and Xeon E5-2697 v2

[power666]

Years ago I build a NAS at home around the X79S-UP5 platform due to its low cost and inclusion of eight SAS ports form the C602 chipset. I've recently come across a Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPU and well, the system won't post with it installed. I've moved the CPU over to another socket 2011 workstation and it'll boot up there so I know the chip at least works at some level (I haven't done any extensive testing other than to see if it works). I have the latest firmware of F5f which adds support for Ivy Bridge-EP Xeons like the above.

I'm wondering if anyone here has had success with this combination.