C1, C2 stepping

[fishy]

so, time to buy new mobo and i see this C2 pop up on some of the motherboards and i don't really know what that means

i did a quick search and found out that C2 supports VT-d, whereas C1 doesn't

i read a bit about that virtualization technology for directed I/O and understand almost nothing

so my question is, what is VT-d, explained in layman's terms

and would an average user have any benefit from it

[Ninety1Nine]

If VT-d has anything to do with Hyper-V like I think it does, you won't benefit from it unless you want to run virtual machines.

[Faa]

VT-d just allows you to take fully advantage of a gpu and more than 256MB vram. You could game in a virtual machine so 4930K's come with VT-d but SB-e requires a C2 stepping and afaik C1 is discontinued. If you don't use hypervisors like vmware etc it's useless.