Motherboard Selection

[Hobby Builder]

Long story short, after a couple of years of running multiple machines for various purposes and my wife's constant complaining of all the noise the systems made in our tiny apartment at night, I have finally decided to take on a massive consolidation project. My current setup involves 6 dedicated machines:

• Windows home office machine (Core i5 4th Gen, 6GB DDR3, Win 7)
• Plex media server machine (Pentium 4, 4GB DDR2, Win XP)
• Linux server machine with Samba Shares (Pentium 4, 2GB DDR2, Ubuntu Server 12.04 Precise Pangolin)
• Linux desktop for audio and video ripping (Pentium 4, 4GB DDR2, Ubuntu Studio Desktop 16.04 Xenial Xerus)
• Linux desktop basic photo editing (Pentium 4, 2GB DDR2, Ubuntu Studio Desktop 14.04 Trusty Tahr)
• Windows desktop for gaming (Skyrim, Flight Sim 2002, Battlefield 2) (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3, Win Vista)

Plus my general purpose laptop, the wife's netbook and an android tablet.

 

I used the machines mostly to learn about Linux, server applications, networking and to test out plausible solutions to see if they would work the way I want them to, or what compromises I could live with.

 

I have just finished dismantling the setup in preparation for a new system build. I've decided to overhaul not just the hardware, but the operating systems I am using as well. 

 

The idea is to start with a Linux server distro most likely Ubuntu as I am most familiar with that, but I am also looking at CentOS or Fedoria that will host Virtual Machines, among other server applications. (i'll create a new thread in the proper forum when I am ready to discuss the OS for this build, mean time back to the motherboard.)

 

I've chosen a Rosewell RSV-L4500 case, which supports up to an EATX Motherboards and an ATX Power Supply.

 

I know which ever CPU I choose will need to support Virtualization and Virtualization I/O Support (Leaning towards Intel for this one, but still open to AMD)

 

I am having a hard time selecting a motherboard for this build as I am getting hung up on chipsets, For example the X99 chipset offers way more PCI Bus lanes than the Z270 and AMD's chipset is outdated but I've found a lot more dual socket motherboards available for the AMD Chipset/Processors.

 

PCI Bus support is going to be important to me, because I do plan on running dual graphics cards in addition to a 4 port NIC card, a RAID Card (if the mobo doesn't have enough SATA Connectors for 12 drives), TV Turner Card and possibly a capture card. Although all the cards will most likely not all be in use at the same time, I don't want a PCI slot to reduce its bandwidth because there isn't enough to go around.

 

I am not looking to go crazy expensive, but I don't want to go dirt cheap just to upgrade a component or two in the next 12 months. 

 

Any suggestions on a a motherboard that supports PCI 3.0, preferably dual sockets and SATA3? I'd love an M.2 slot as well but that is purely an optional feature for my build.

[Crossbred]

Given that ryzen will only support single-CPU and we haven't heard much about zen server products, Intel is the way to go here.

If you're looking at a 2011-3 board there is the asus z10pe-d16. It has dual sockets, two pcie slots for dual GPU, and m.2.

The main problem with your build is that good dual socket motherboards usually don't come in atx-style form factors. This board comes in ssi-eeb which shares some screws with eatx boards but will need others drilled into the case manually.