Motherboards for Xeon

Hi,

I am building my first PC/workstation and I am planning on going for an Intel Xeon E1240 V2 Ivy Bridge CPU. Could you please recommend a few motherboards that would be a good match for this CPU?

I would the motherboard to have the following:
- SLI/Crossfire compatibility
- Support up to 32 GB RAM
- Reliable and good performance for a budget home build.
- No need for overclocking on CPU, but overclocking compatibility on the GPU would be nice if possible (but not essential)

My budget for the motherboard is around £100, to keep my over build cost below £700.

Many Thanks.

Why did you go with a Xeon? With that selection you have to be careful that the board supports and ships with the right bios. For example the Gigabyte z77 UD5H, that CPU would only work with the latest F8 bios.

I recall from your many other threads that you do some calculations and such, but just wonder why you suddenly want a Xeon...You went from 3570k to AMD to xeon to.......? You are all over the map! LOL!

Also, gpu overclocking is done via software and has nothing to do with the mobo.

32gb ram, a xeon, and a xeon mobo for 700$? O.O

Lol! It's true earthdog, this is my first build and finding it hard to set on fixed components. When I first set my build list I set a budget and performance requirements, but the more I studied and learnt from others, e.g. on this forum, the deeper this all gets!

My reasoning behind the Xeon was the following:
1) It will give me roughly i7 performance for i5 price
2) Am going to purchase a GPU, so onboard graphics are not really required for me
3) Plan to leave my PC running sometimes 24/7 on 80-100% load to run computational analysis, which I need to be reliable and stable.

Does that all make sense and sound logical? Thanks.

Chirkk, thats £700 (UK pounds).. I am planning to start off with 2 x 8GB RAM (16GB), but later on add another 16GB. I need the RAM for my numerical analysis work.

Just looking at the specs of the Asrock Motherboard Extreme 4 on my current build list, and it seems this does support the Xeon.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z77 Extreme4-M/?cat=CPU

Is it as simple as that... or am I missing something here??

Thanks