Motherboard with Dolby Home Theater AND VT-d support?

[McAnsi]

Hi,

I'm looking for a motherboard that supports Dolby Home Theater (e.g. has the ALC889 chip) and Intel's VT-d technology.

Unfortunately it is very difficult to search for boards based on a certain feature set on the Gigabyte website. Given the huge number of boards available, a searchable feature matrix like the one provided by Intel (e.g. at http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?VTD=true) would be extremely helpful.


Thanks,

  Markus

[MarkJohnson]

It's the CPU mainly that needs VT-d support, however there are a rare few motherboards that don't.

I'd suggest asking which board you are interested in buying and someone here can probably verify.

Also, all newer non-K series Core i chips have VT-d support. and all Xeon E3 series chips have it as well.

Luck
-=Mark=-

[McAnsi]

If I look at the Bios settings in the user manuals of different motherboards, almost all of them indeed have the "Virtualization Technology: Enable/Disable" option, but only a few also have the "VT-d: Enable/Disable" option. This makes me think that your statement that most motherboards support it only applies to general virtualization (VT-x), but not to I/O device virtualization (VT-d).

Meanwhile I have found 3 boards that do support VT-d and Dolby Home Theater: The GA-X79-UD series. Unfortunately these motherboards seem to have been shipped initially with a Bios (F7) that only supports 2 CPUs (i7-3930K and -3960X), which both happen to NOT support VT-d. If I look at product reviews on Amazon or Newegg, this has lead to many people not being able to use their board with a different CPU as you can't update the Bios if you don't have one of the two above mentioned CPUs. Since I don't feel like wasting money on buying two different CPUs, one of which will go right to storage after 2 mins of use, I'd rather avoid these boards.

If it wasn't for this problem, the GA-X79-UD5 would actually seem perfect for my needs, since it also has the PCI-e slot in the right position to fit the riser card in my Thermaltake Mozart Home-Theater case, but unfortunately it is the board with the worst reviews of the three.

[MarkJohnson]

Maybe you should state the p[purpose of you rig and what parts you may already have.

It will be easier to to make suggestions.

-=Mark=-

[McAnsi]

I don't have too many parts yet... And the ones I have, I can replace if needed. I am really just looking for a list of boards that support Dolby Home Theater and VT-d.

It's just very painful to have to do a Google search for "GigaByte Dolby Home Theater", then look through all the links (which end up coming from all over the place) to try to compile a hopefully somewhat comprehensive list of candidate boards and then having to download their manuals one-by-one and looking at the BIOS settings to figure out whether they do VT-d...

But just for completeness: I am actually looking to rebuild 2 of my systems: My main development PC and my home theater PC (both connected to 5.1 speakers via SPDIF (that's why Dolby Home Theater)). Since I like messing with my computers a lot and trying out all sorts of random software and operating systems, but at the same time need a stable system for each, I would like to try and see what I can do with Xen and "Desktop Virtualization". For this I need VT-d so I can get as close to full system performance (especially for the GFX card) as possible without having to use para-virtualized drivers for the installed OSes.

But really, I would rather not discuss why I asked the question (I have my reasons and did a lot of research), but would rather just see a list of boards...

[MarkJohnson]

The main reason I was asking was cost and how much power you needed plus how dedicated you were to Dolby home theater.  I think you can accomplish all your feats with a simple i3 processor.  I'd recommend a z68 or similar board.  I seen a z68-ud4 that has your alc889 chip.  others may have support, but not sure on the Dolby being universal.  It may even be beneficial to buying a dedicated sound card for hi-fi sound systems.  they have a noticeable sound difference.

X79 board should all support VT-d as they are basically a workstation board and should even support ECC memory and Xeon chips.  It doesn't sound like you need such a system as why I suggested an i3 chip.  I even bought a dual core E3-1220l v2 low power processor (17Watts/2.3GHz-3.5GHz turbo) for my home server that runs ESXi.  It has great hardware acceleration.  I'm not sure if Xen uses anything other than para-virtualization (used to be all it supported), but ESXi is super fast and light weight.

Looking in manuals for VT-d support on BIOS pages may not be ideal.  VT-d is not supported on all CPUs and therefore won't show up in the BIOS if not on CPU.  Very few motherboards lack support.  Usually from immature BIOS or purposely left out.  All recent Intel chipsets support VT-d.  Atleast Core i and newer.  maybe core 2 duo as well, not sure.

Just verify before purchase and make sure MB has proper BIOS installed beforehand.  I think Mwave still offers this service when buying mb/CPU combo.  It used to be $9.99 extra.  well worth it, especially on newer chipsets/CPUs.

Luck
-=Mark=-