Motherboard for workstation

[Abula]

Hi,

I'm doing a PC that will be multipurpose, not 100% server, but a combination of a lot of things, i was going to post on the motherboard section, but upon checking with LSI about thei raid controller, they said some consumer grade mobos might have issues with LSI raid cards, so i decided to build around a server board or a workstation.

I want to find a motherboard that can run the following
1) GTX1080ti (dual slot minimum or 2.5 slot more likely). ----> 16x PCIe
2) LSI 9271-8i (for building a raid 6 with 8x 4TB Seagate drives) -----> 8x PCIe
3) Datapath HDMI Capture card (for recording two HDMI cameras) -----> 4x PCIe
4) Intel 900p 480 PCIe SSD (for compiling and editing) ---> 4x PCIe

Most of the consumer grade mobos, are 8x8x4. Threadripper has a ton of PCIe lanes, so i was ser on building aorund a 1950x, specially with the $799 pricing some days ago, until LSI said the card might or not work. Also i discarded Threadripper for some issues that i seen on their forums about not using fully all cores and that it loses to lower corecount cpus as adobe is not design or optimized for it.

So help me find a server or workstation/server motherboard that can hose that hardware. Its mainly going to be a headless PC that will be capturing video from different sources, at some point it might stream as secondary pc, and will be the rendering workstation for adobe premiere, afterefects, davinci, etc.

There is no set budget for it, just looking for something that will work, else i might just give up on LSI raid card and go back into a consumer grade mobos.

 

[sinisterDei]

they said some consumer grade mobos might have issues with LSI raid cards,

Never heard of that, and sounds like bullshit. PCIe is PCIe. Threadripper would be fine, as would various X99 type platforms, or even lower forms of consumer grade hardware. LSI is just playing the bullshit 'certification' game to get you to put their card in one of their 'officially supported platforms' sold by one of their authorized partner blah blah blah. Now then, make sure there are drivers for your chosen OS - some vendors like to play their 'authorized' game with drivers to try and force compliance - like Intel with I211 NIC drivers refusing to install on Server 2016 just because Intel want you to buy a 'server' board with a 'server' NIC on it. Even those games are bullshit though, and can likely be bypassed - the I211 driver installs just fine on 2016 if you go and remove the line from the INF that excludes that OS from the list of valid OSs, and the LSI cards should be the same.

You can go with a 'server' platform if you want to run Xeon or Epyc, but you'll be buying ECC DDR4 to go with it, and you likely won't have the ability to overclock, which if you're worried about single-threaded performance should still be on your radar as a possibility.

 

[Aluminum]

until LSI said the card might or not work. Also i discarded Threadripper for some issues that i seen on their forums about not using fully all cores and that it loses to lower corecount cpus as adobe is not design or optimized for it.

All of the above is bullshit, signed: 1950X with LSI 3008 card and more. It beats down my 22 core E5 on just about everything. You also might want to look at a Vega FE on sale for same price as 1080ti depending on what 'professional' stuff you are running.

 

[rive22]

I've used LSI cards on consumer mobos before just fine. Though I wouldn't run a raid 6 without ECC.

 

[sinisterDei]

Though I wouldn't run a raid 6 without ECC.

So, now I'm curious again - why?

My previous RAID 6 array was 8x3TB drives on an 9690SA-8i RAID card, before that it was 8x2TB drives in RAID6 on a HighPoint 2640x4 card - neither of which gave me any trouble and ran on a standard Z97 chipset with non-ECC RAM. My current array is 8x8TB and happens to be on a server platform, but that's cause I got the CPUs and RAM for free, not because I was aiming at ECC or anything.