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  • hulu - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    In Board Features > Memory Slots, says "Up to Dual Channel". Shouldn't it be quad channel?
  • dgingeri - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Well, it could be useful for a high level home server with that many slots. Put a low end video card in the top, raid controller in the second, quad port 1Gb NICs in the 4th and 5th, and have the last slot available for a 10Gb card if needed. Wouldn't even need a switch to go with it. All in one, storage, network, routing, high end network. It has possibilities.
  • Rick83 - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    But most of that you can do with 1155, and for that price you can get a board with ECC support to boot, won't need any GPU at all (unless you get a Xeon that has the GPU disabled), and still have plenty room to grow. 1155 has plenty of PCIe bandwidth, as long as most of your load is from two expansion slots. Hooking up RAID and networking directly to the CPU means that you will have two or three expansion cards that may eventually be bandwidth restrained, but even then opting for a board with a PCIe MUX would be in the same league, price-wise as this, and have plenty of bandwidth for up to four cards - and most non-GPU cards aren't really PCIe restricted. Quad GbE is one lane PCIe3, 10GbE is 2-4 lanes, 8x 6Gb SAS with software RAID over SSDs is going to need 8x PCIeV3, but realistically 4x is going to be enough, if you use hardware RAID or spinning platters.

    No, the only reason for this board, is if you want a cheap rendering machine. 6-8 cores and 64GB of RAM on a 250 dollar board is pretty nice. If you want gaming, you'll probably be looking at boards higher up the foodchain, as the GPUs alone will come in at around 2-3k dollars, and another 100 on the board won't really matter, if you get better sound and other nifty features.
    GPU computer might be another use case, but then that's even rarer than rendering boxes, from what I've seen so far. Might be a nice little GPU compute dev workstation.
  • Flunk - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    There really isn't any need for this as a home server. It's total overkill. Even a Core 2 Quad can transcode multiple 1080p streams while serving files, routing and doing all the other common home server tasks. Home servers don't really need much power, most homes don't have more than 4-6 users.
  • dgingeri - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    For total I/O and a poor man's 10Gbe switch, socket 2011 or 1366 can't be beat. That's what I mostly use my home servers for. Socket 775, 1155, or 1150 systems simply can't provide the I/O to run a software switch that includes 10Gbe.

    Yeah, sure, 10Gbe is hardly worth the expense in a home server. However, with a raid controller and quad drive set capable of pushing 400MB/s, it can be useful for video editing over a network drive, or a few other things.

    I do it as an experiment on future uses and self training. Right now, I have three servers interconnected with 10Gb over such a poor man's 10Gbe switch running a total of 14 VMs over 3 domains with 6 domain controllers, 3 WDS servers, and some 'workstations', just to prove I could do it before I propose doing the same thing with the DNS servers in my lab. (We currently have 4 domains across 17 departments, with 3 of those 4 running Linux DNS servers that don't talk to each other. It's really annoying working on machines that cross those domains. So, I had to come up with a plan to fix it with Windows DNS and AD, and eventually migrate down to one domain. In addition, I was to come up with a way to manage user accounts through Windows AD for a single centralized vCenter server to manage our test VM hosts. I wasn't sure I could do it until I spent a weekend building all these VMs.) All of those VMs are running on iSCSI storage over 10Gbe from the storage server. I did all this with two Dell T110 II servers, one for storage and one for routing/switch, and a piecemeal FX-6100 VM host and 4 Intel CX4 10Gbe NICs.

    In essence, I was just dreaming about a more capable central server for my experiments when I posted that previous comment. I could switch the storage and switch duties to a system with this board and use the Dells as further VM hosts. Maybe I'm just spoiled with all this hardware at work.
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Copy/Paste error from my spec tables which I hand code to make it easier :) Should be fixed.

    Ian
  • Bal - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Ok I am not one to criticize articles, but this reads REALLY poorly. I mean I am the guy who misspells every other word and uses slang, misses apostrophes etc. So I forgive everything as long as its readable. But I could not get past the first page of this review.

    The writer misuses "are" and "is" so often I have to reread every other sentence. He completely misses using the word "the" and it also makes you reread each sentence. Read the first two paragraphs and someone tell me I am wrong? Am I just grumpy, hungover or what?
  • The PC Apologist - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Hahaha, you must be new to Ian. He's rather infamous for his "style."

    It would seem that eloquence is not as valued as passion when it comes to the tech journalism industry, even for Anandtech. Refer to the 14 AIO coolers article and its comments section to see an excellent example of what I mean. There I had a little exchange with the author and boy, it’s not pretty.

    Although one could say that one doesn’t read a motherboard review, or any other tech article, to brush up on one’s English grammar or writing skills, but rather just to look at some pretty pictures, learn the price/specs, and read the conclusion, it’s somewhat of a weak cop-out as one would also expect AnandTech to strive for higher standards. Reading is reading and a poorly written article is a poorly written article, regardless of topic. Other sites aren’t much better though. And to their defense, there are some decent writers, in terms of pure writing, here at AnandTech, not least of which is Anand himself. And who knows? I might even answer AnandTech’s Call for Writers one of these days. So fret not, all hope is not lost.

    - The PC Apologist
  • thesavvymage - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    I would absolutely loathe you writing for this site. I'm sure the other writers would hate you writing with them as well, pretty much every time I see you in the comments it is because you are complaining of the competence of the english and grammar of the article.
  • BlakKW - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    +1
  • chuonglb - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    good
    kizi: http://www.kizi10games.net

    friv: http://www.friv200jogos.org

    yepi: http://www.yepi10games.org
  • The PC Apologist - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    1) How many times have you seen me in the comments?

    2) Is complaining about poor English or bad grammar inherently bad?

    3) Are my complaints illegitimate/inappropriate (calling good grammar bad)?

    4) Do you come to this site expecting a pep talk or a well-written article?

    5) Does you loathing me count towards the calculus of anything?

    Thank you.
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Commonly people like to point out that I refer to companies using plural terms, as is the standard in the UK and persistent throughout my UK upbringing. No matter how hard I try and convert into singular style common in the US, it requires a complete reworking of my brain which I cannot do on the fly. So any attempt to try and patch the difference ends up half-baked, as it were.

    If you have specific suggestions, feel free to email by clicking on my name at the top of the article.

    Ian
  • The PC Apologist - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    No worries Ian.

    I appreciate the candor and sincerity. It’s nice to know that you’re open enough for constructive criticism and room for improvement, which can’t be said for everybody. But as far as writing goes, I suspect that the problem lies beyond just the confusion of singular vs. plural. Such can just be attributed to carelessness and be called honest mistakes. Rather, sometimes, there seems to be a lack of deeper substance and coherent flow. Other times, the language is simply not “beautiful,” but rather mundane and unenthused.

    But like I said, for the time being, no worries. What’s important is that you’re open to suggestion and change. Writing is, among other things, an art, and it’s rather difficult to codify the formula for success. But with the correct attitude, one will eventually evolve and improve with practice, lots of reading (of good writers), and rigorous analytical thinking.

    - The PC Apologist
  • Nfarce - Sunday, February 16, 2014 - link

    PCA - just go start your own blog and STFU. We don't need your distractions, pompous jerkwad.
  • khanov - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    I think you are used to reading 'Americanese'. There is nothing wrong with Ian's English.
  • The PC Apologist - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    I think you are used to being "nice." There is nothing wrong with being honest from time to time.
  • DMCalloway - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Unfortunately, the i7 2600k wasn't included in the benchmarks. This would have given the reader a clear overview of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation i7 performance for comparison.
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link

    Most of the results from other processors were derived from the retest required for the 2014 benchmark suite, initiated by the AMD Kaveri review. In time I will be going back and testing older CPUs when the backlog of review hardware falls to a reasonable level.
  • The_Assimilator - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    Can you guys please start deducting points for motherboards that still include COM headers?
  • flemeister - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    Why? It still gets used occasionally, and it hardly takes up any room on the motherboard, unlike the old floppy and IDE headers.
  • SirKnobsworth - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    Would I be correct in saying that only 3 of the secondary (2.0) PCIe lanes are being used? The PCH provides 8, but I only see one x1 slot, one NIC, and one USB 3 controller. At the very least they could have swapped the x1 slot for an x4 slot, allowing a high performance SSD to be installed.
  • 0xc000005 - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link

    This is a great board, bought one at work and it is excellent. The only letdown is that there are no drivers for windows server operating systems.
  • Gigaplex - Sunday, February 16, 2014 - link

    Considering it's using off the shelf chips that don't require special drivers, there should be no problem getting Windows Server working on it. Just don't expect them from MSIs website.
  • Achaios - Sunday, February 16, 2014 - link

    This "military class" thing is annoying.

    I wonder how well would this mobo fare under 5g stress, or say, after 5 days of a typical anti-guerilla mission mounted on an armoured vehicle moving through mountainous terrain/and/or cross country.

    Or for instance, how well would it fare mounted on a PC onboard a Naval vessel after said vessel put its engines on "crash full astern" after making 30-35 knots on full ahead. Would this motherboard be able to withstand the excessive vibration produced by the engines of the said Naval Vessel? If not, what is the point of calling it "military class"?
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link

    Marketing. :-)
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link

    I haven't played with Xeons for a while so I don't recall if Intel locks the Xeons in the factory, but assuming that this board can take it, what do you think the overclocking potential is for one of the oh-so-expensively-priced E5-2697 v2s are?
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link

    XEONs are indeed locked, so the only oc'ing possible is via straps
    and the limited potential of a base clock increase. In this respect,
    it's easier to mess about with X58 XEONs (still locked, but oc'ing
    was mostly via bclk anyway).

    Ian.
  • mapesdhs - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link


    Ian, re the SATA3 ports that are part of Intel's X79 chipset, do you know if
    Intel makes a SATA3 RAID or JBOD card which uses the same circuitry
    which drives their X79 SATA3 ports? Or does any other company make such
    a thing based on Intel's SATA3 technology? On X79 boards which only have
    a Marvell chip (terrible controller) for additional SATA3, it would be great to
    be able to add a PCIe card that provided the same functionality as a full set
    of proper Intel SATA3 ports. I have an ASUS P9X79 WS, specced up the wazoo:

    http://valid.canardpc.com/zk69q8

    but the only thing which really lets it down is the limited number of Intel SATA3
    ports (ie. 2).

    Ian.
  • Morcrist - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link

    Is it just me, or does the author completely miss the fact that this board supports 128 GB of ram?

    I mean, it kinda' threw me off at first when on the first page he alternately refers to the board as a GD45 and a GD65. I thought maybe the 'GD65' only supported the 64 GB.

    But no, every image in the article has GD45 on it so...

    WTF?
  • devdollers@gmail.com - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    nice board again........
  • chuonglb - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    too great, great for plowing games...
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    friv: http://www.friv200jogos.org

    yepi: http://www.yepi10games.org
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  • sharkyboy - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link

    actual supported RAM is 128GB check the vendor site
    http://www.msi.com/product/mb/X79A-GD45-Plus.html#...
  • sharkyboy - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link

    does the motherboard support VT/HT for virtualization?
    Thanks in advance
  • Crimson Ryoka - Sunday, January 4, 2015 - link

    Does anyone notice how this article shows how much an amd 7850k can compete with i7s cost for performance. sub $800 a complete 7850k r9 290 build can be achieved, thats insane
  • changhana - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link

    thankyu
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