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Recommend me a 1156 motherboard

E

ecom

Senior member
I am looking for suggestions for a 1156 motherboard. I think I'm going to go with an I7-860. Is there a big advantage to go I7-930 instead? Mainly I am going I7-860 is because of the lower TDP on the Lynnfield. I can't afford to play with Xeons and this is not a production environment, so I7 is good enough for me.

I may use for gaming, but not often. I definitely will only have one video card, prolly something midrange. I need the build to be stable most importantly. I am not considering overclocking at this time.

I will use it for the final year in my computer sci degree so I imagine I will do a decent amount of coding and possibly image processing. By that I mean I might get a stack of 700 TIFF files and run analysis on them.

I am likely going to run VMs. When experimenting with VMs, I might have between 2 to 4 VMs running as a test platform. I will have a one or two Win2008 (possibly R2) servers, eg DC and SCCM VMs and one or two Windows client machines. (All legally acquired.)

At this time, I am finding that I am able to run 3 VM simultaneously fine, but have not tried more yet. The set up is a Asus board P965, E8400, and 8GB of RAM. I found that the major bottle neck is the disk. After I put two drives in RAID 0, speed of the VMs improved dramatically. My host OS runs on a separate drive. The RAID is exclusively for my VMs ATM.
 
You basically already said what you need:

- tons of ram
- fast disk system

As far as i know most 1156 MB are limited to 4 Ram slots. 4x4 GB = 16 GB of ram.
socket 1366 mobos usually have 6 ram slots = 24 Gb of ram possible.

What is the probelm with your current system?
I'm not sure what "analyzing 700 tiff's" means. Is the application multi-threaded? How long does such a run take? If not multi-threaded benefit from an 4 core i7 is probably limited. Is time crucial? If running overnight is fine, well no need for a faster cpu.

My suggesting ignoring budget:
Get as much ram as possible. But I think 16 gb should be fine. So yes 1156 would do. Just choose a mobo with 4 ram slots that support 4 GB modules.
Second I would suggest to wait for the next round of new ssd's and get at least 2 of them, one for your main OS (can be small) and one for your vm's (big). 4 vm's of an ssd will still be much faster than of a raid 0 array.

Basically invest in ram and storage system speed.
If it helps you could try to get a good deal (=cheap) on a core2Quad if your mobo supports it for better multi-threaded performance.
 
I guess what I was looking for was specific manufacturers or models of boards. Newegg has over 150 socket 1156 boards. The move to 1156/i7 is mostly for two more cores and better power efficiency.

As far as going Core quad...I had not thought about that path, but Q9300 seems affordable. Q9650 is about 70% more than the Q9300.

The image programs I worked on could take anywhere from 10 min to a couple days, even on a dual 4 core Xeon, some of these process takes a day when multithreaded. It depends on algorithms I run against them. Some were multithreaded, some were not. Time is not critical for this - stability is more important here. I don't do a lot of this type of thing, but it was a consideration.

I do more x264 video encoding than that image processing. Something I forgot to mention.

Another thought I had for building the new system was to use the I7 machine as a dedicated VM host and then keep the current system for my workstation.
 
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Whats your budget?

For video encoding i7 is the way to go. I would say if you don't overclock and don't need any other fancy stuff just buy a standard intel board. less features = less possible problems. I don't really know if they are more reliable than others but i've never had an such issues running seti@home 24/7 till now even on crappy OEM boards.
So just pick one with at least 4 ram slots and think about the ssd's.
 
if you don't need any special features (SLI, Crossfire, USB3, SATA-3) just take an intel board and invest most of the money into RAM and the storage system (=ssd).
I would choose 1 rather small ssd for the OS, and a bigger one for all the VM's.

I would say that will boost VM performance. Not sure if needed. I actually use some VM's on an usb 2 disk and it's OK. Better than one would imagine.
 
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