Solved Z10PE-D8 WS

A

abishai

Hello.

I'm building a new PC for myself and I want something exotic :) I'm thinking about Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard. (http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/Z10PED8_WS/specifications/) It uses server components, so I hope it should be supported by FreeBSD. Also, manual states that legacy boot can be enabled, so no need to mess with UEFI and UFS on /

Looks like decent choose for me, if C612 chipset is supported. Maybe some one has experience with this motherboard or other C612 one? It will be disaster if FreeBSD fails on this and I'll be forced to befriend Tux
 
Had no problems with SuperMicro C612 UP Boards so far.

A workstation Board with overclocking ... uh,oh,weird?
"Unique BIOS for Dual CPU O.C. –Boost CPU’s overclocking performance up to 10%"
 
AFAIK, Supermicro has the similar technology, calls it Hyper Speed. But maybe you are right, I'll haunt freebsd-hardware mailing list as I found no trace of this mobo even on Linux forums.
I heard Supermicro tests their boards to be compatible with FreeBSD?
 
It should work fine except that there isn't any support for the builtin graphics, you might need to run -CURRENT due to hardware support.

Are you going to dual CPUs? Otherwise I'd recommend you have a look at a single socket board with ECC support.
//Danne
 
Uhm... Realtek audio and ALC1150 is pretty much as good as it gets on a motherboard and has by far the best driver support. That said, I'd have a look at an Intel C22*-board instead.
//Danne
 
What would you suggest: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x10dai.cfm vs http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/Z10PED8_WS/specifications/ ? The prices are the same.

Supermicro PRO
1. Well known server market vendor
2. Compatible with FreeBSD according OS compatibility list. Nice to see this, even Intel provide no support of FreeBSD ("runs but ask for support on freebsd.org")
3. E-ATX form-factor - compatibility with any bigtower

Supermicro CON
1. No SLI/Crossfire X10DAX has SLI support, but advantages of SLI in games can be with
- DX11+ support added in wine
- Wayland comes to FreeBSD
Latter assumes PRIME will be also available in FreeBSD, so I just put AMD with open source driver and DAX has no Crossfire feature.
2. No overclocking
3. The closest to CPUs PCIx16 is CPU2 controlled - will be unavailable with 1 CPU configuration. Not sure this is an issue, but rule of thumb is "closer -> better"

ASUS PRO
1. SLI/Crossfire support, so more than one GPU card (see supermicro cons)
2. Overclocking (yeah, sure, on workstation :) )
3. The closest PCIx16 is CPU1 driven.

ASUS CON
1. No compatibility with FreeBSD announced
2. Not known on server market, can put weird things in BIOS
3. EEB form-factor - 2-3 holes need to be drilled in E-ATX compatible case
 
diizzy said:
Uhm... Realtek audio and ALC1150 is pretty much as good as it gets on a motherboard and has by far the best driver support. That said, I'd have a look at an Intel C22*-board instead.
//Danne
Click to expand...
Are we talking here about FreeBSD 10.1 or Windows 10 audio support? Realtek is pretty much the most hostile company to open source OS like FreeBSD right next to NVidia. I would not touch Realtek hardware with a broomstick.
 
abishai said:
What would you suggest: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x10dai.cfm vs http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/Z10PED8_WS/specifications/ ? The prices are the same.

Supermicro PRO
1. Well known server market vendor
2. Compatible with FreeBSD according OS compatibility list. Nice to see this, even Intel provide no support of FreeBSD ("runs but ask for support on freebsd.org")
3. E-ATX form-factor - compatibility with any bigtower

Supermicro CON
1. No SLI/Crossfire X10DAX has SLI support, but advantages of SLI in games can be with
- DX11+ support added in wine
- Wayland comes to FreeBSD
Latter assumes PRIME will be also available in FreeBSD, so I just put AMD with open source driver and DAX has no Crossfire feature.
2. No overclocking
3. The closest to CPUs PCIx16 is CPU2 controlled - will be unavailable with 1 CPU configuration. Not sure this is an issue, but rule of thumb is "closer -> better"

ASUS PRO
1. SLI/Crossfire support, so more than one GPU card (see supermicro cons)
2. Overclocking (yeah, sure, on workstation :) )
3. The closest PCIx16 is CPU1 driven.

ASUS CON
1. No compatibility with FreeBSD announced
2. Not known on server market, can put weird things in BIOS
3. EEB form-factor - 2-3 holes need to be drilled in E-ATX compatible case
Click to expand...
FreeBSD lacks a basic support for Haswell and similar open source friendly video hardware. SLI is proprietary NVidia technology. Between you have listed here bunch of Windows specific things which are interesting to gamers. I can understand that some people like to play video games even that I personally never played video games. What I can't understand why would those people use FreeBSD.
 
Oko said:
FreeBSD lacks a basic support for Haswell and similar open source friendly video hardware. SLI is proprietary NVidia technology. Between you have listed here bunch of Windows specific things which are interesting to gamers. I can understand that some people like to play video games even that I personally never played video games. What I can't understand why would those people use FreeBSD.
Click to expand...
As far as I know, Xeon E5 does not have IGP. Thus, if gaming was one of the requirements of this build, a separate GPU would be compulsory whatever OS the OP chose.
 
I bought SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SRA-O motherboard and very happy with it. If someone needs boot log or pciconf - ask away.
 
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