I have repurposed my workstation hardware into a server for VMs and homelab testing - I have a few features that are not immediately present that I suspect from research may be available. Is anyone able to assist with the following;
-PCIe port Bifurcation – To allow splitting gen3 16x slots into x4/x4/x4/x4 or x8/x4/x4 or x8/x8 with a riser card –Thinking of adding Thunderbolt or a GPU for vGPU experimentation (if this board can do it…)
-SR-IOV – Can this be enabled on the motherboard BIOS? I have read VT-d is a pre-requisite and some have managed to enable this on other x79 boards…
Lastly, a heads up for folks who use this board in the future- -Mellanox ConnectX-3 SFP+ PCIe Gen3 card (CX311A on 2.42.5000 fw) - This card is 100% not picked up by the BIOS but works in other machines. System browser does not see it at all.
Expansion slots starting from CPU downward; (PCIe)-Mellanox CX311A SFP+ 10gbE card (latest firmware 2.42.5000 - Flexboot ROM disabled) (NOT DETECTED by board) - This will likely be swapped for an Intel XL710 quad SFP+ card since we cannot get it to pickup. (PCIe)-WiFi card (PCI)-Nvidia TNT2 for basic video out (PCIe)-PERC H730 raid card -8x 4tb HDD 7200rpm NAS - RAID6 - Bulk storage (PCIe)-Areca ARC-1210 RAID6 card -4x 3tb HDD 5900rpm NAS - RAID6 - Archive (System Board) -4x 1tb EVO 850 SSD in RAID0 live data, differential backups run daily
Any assistance greatly appreciated. Ideally I would like to bifurcate the 16 in to two x8 slots and run a bigger GPU in the x8 slot on the bottom but if I can split any of them I would be happy.
Thanks for getting back to me! Lot of pressing life events happening here so I have been too busy to try this but I will give it a shot soon and report back. I need to get my hands on a PCIe ribbon and a 8x8 bifurcation card to test. Shame they’re not on Amazon.
Fyi; -I ended up swapping out the Mellanox ConnectX-3 card for a Intel X710-T4 which works flawlessly –*BSD drivers are terrible for the Intel X710 series cards so pfSense/OPNsense (both FreeBSD) are no-go you need to break out to Linux for Sophos UTW or XG or go with Windows… *BSD was dropping 40-60% packets with 2000ms latency, definitely a bug there. -The Areca raid card will be getting pulled soon due to a data recovery request for some data off of the old array. Good thing I didn’t wipe it and left things labeled… –In exchange for the RAID card I now have my hands on a LSI QSFP HBA for use with a Netapp DS4246
