Looking for a motherboard that may not exist

DeaconFrost

DeaconFrost

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I have a Dell Precision workstation that has a Xeon E5-2660 v1 processor. We recently upgraded the memory in our vBlocks at work, so we have piles of 16 GB DDR4-2133 ECC memory sticks.

Is there an aftermarket motherboard that could utilize both CPU and memory? I see plenty of Socket 2011 boards that handle Xeon processors, but they all mention v3 and v4 of my CPU. I'm not sure why the v3 and v4 versions would work but not mine, but who knows.
 
There is more than one socket 2011: named socket R, R2, R3 if you dig deep enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011

"Original" 2011 is for E5v1/v2 DDR3 xeons, chipset is C600 series and X79.

2011v1 is for E7v2 and E7v3 xeons, stay away.

2011v3 is for DDR4 E5v3/v4 xeons (ignoring the weird DDR3 haswell stuff on purpose), chipset is C610 series and X99.

All "socket 2011". I have yet to verify this but apparently most socket 2011 does not have exactly 2011 pins anyways.

The naming is extra shitty because a multi-billion dollar company known as intel apparently makes more profit by not bothering to use intelligent product naming conventions, being deceptive through "technical" obfuscation is in their nature to be honest.
 
So, if I am understanding right, my processor is married to DDR3, so I am not going to find a motherboard capable of handling both. However, a v3 CPU should be able to do so.

Thanks for the info!
 
Yes, you have one of the CPUs that Aluminum said to "stay away" from, the 2011V1. Any 2011v3 Xeon will work okay with those 16GB ECC whoppers. Just double check compatibility first on your third party motherboard.
 
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. I will likely end up just keeping the tower as my VMWare box for now. It works great and was surprisingly cheap.
 
"Looking for a motherboard that may not exist"

that would make it extra hard to find :barefoot:
 
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