What's a good dual CPU board?

[r06ue1]

Looking for:

dual CPU
quad core opteron processors
support for 16 GB RAM
no onboard video
unregistered RAM
ATX board
Overclock ability (going to water cool it)

Any ideas?

I'm planning to use this as my VM server and may run some games under VM sessions on it so it needs to have good video support. This is only for dual (and triple) boxing and not my primary system. I currently have a single CPU Opteron system running XP64bit with 8 GB of RAM but want to upgrade to support more VM servers (I'm a server admin) and better gaming ability.

[ua549]

There are very few dual socket boards that can be over clocked.
Most are designed for servers wtere reliability and long product life cycles are most important.
Supermicro.com has some great multi-socket boards, but they are not for o'cing.

[James]

I would also recommend Supermicro for absolutely rock solid and reliable multi-socket motherboards. But OC'ing is not in the cards with them.

[James]

And as if on cue:

EVGA Dual socket 980x motherboard

Looks to be everything you want. but it's brand new unexplored hardware territory, so stability might not be the greatest. $600

[kent1146]

Yeah, I saw the eVGA announcement the other day. That's a pretty sweet motherboard. dual Socket 1366 support, quad-SLI support, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0 support.

[Nater]

Just get a Supermicro board, they're the best of the workstation market. They're more known for their intel boards, however.

The EVGA motherboard is less a workstation board, it's an extreme enthusiast board. I don't think someone doing CFD at their desktop is going to risk math errors on an overclocked processor, rare as it may be with mild overclocking.

I also think that unless you're software definitely prefers AMD processors that you should go intel. AMD can compete with intel at the low-end and the very high-end (4S and up). Intel is more or less unbeatable in the 2S market segment, the new six-core and quad-core Gulftown processors are only going to add to their performance superiority.

If you're wanting to overclock (I don't know why) you're not going to find an AMD board that offers much in that respect, if at all. The only overclockable dual CPU motherboard is that EVGA model. I also don't think it's a good idea to use un-registered RAM. The sort of precision applications that you need a dual CPU computer for need error correction and registers. I don't think they day is far off when all computers are going to need it, memory errors were recently found to occur ten times more than was previously expected.

Pretty much all server/workstation boards come with some sort of on-board video chipset, it's easy enough to disable if you're going to run discrete graphics. You also aren't going to find many ATX 2S motherboards, they're usually all EATX or bigger. The few ATX boards there are are generally limited compared to their EATX brothers.

You can forget about gaming in a VM too, it just doesn't really work.