Haswell Motherboards?

[garyc]

It is time to upgrade the desktop system and I am looking at the socket 1150 Haswell architecture. The problem I have is finding a suitable motherboard. The main requirements are:

- Linux compatible
- Virtualization technology for directed I/O (VT-d)

Does anyone have some good recommendations?

Some background / ranting: The most difficult requirement seems to be the VT-d, the Linux aspect does not seem to be an issue. Unlike the laptop and server boards, the Haswell desktop boards seem to have poor support for VT-d. Very few manufacturers have it in the specifications. Of those that do the forums indicate that the functionality may be broken. Intel’s site show support for specific boards on some of their pages and then state a lack of support for the same boards on other pages. By now I am starting to lean more towards an S1200 type board.

 

[Rickster]

Here


Just make sure the CPU supports VT-d.

 

[garyc]

Here


Just make sure the CPU supports VT-d.

Thanks for the find. I was wondering who might have Q87 motherboards, but did not think to look at Rebel Tech. The CPU will be a non-K i7.

The Asus P9D WS also looks interesting, but there seems to be less information on it than there is on the Q87M-E.

 

[Pada]

Why do you need VT-d (directed I/O for virtualization) and not just VT-x (hardware virtualization)?
Do you want to do GPU intensive stuff or other very high performance requirements?

 

[garyc]

A good question - one that I have been asking myself. The motivation for VT-d was to to have the facility for CUDA compilation inside a VM. The need for this is fully defined yet, but including the facility seemed like a good idea if it was not going to add significant cost to the build. Since I have not tried this yet I have no idea how well this will work. In the meantime I have looked at the GPUs which have been certified for this process. They are the really expensive ones.

This is starting to make me wonder if I should be compromising the build with the VT-d requirement, maybe just go with VT-x.