Question Help finding a motherboard for this Xeon

[melonlink]

So I got a Xeon E5 2696 v4, and surprisingly there's almost no info about it. Hell - it doesn't even have a product page on Intel's site. I have been wanting to build a PC with this for a while now, but just hadn't gotten up to it until now. I'm really confused because apparently I'm supposed to use an X99 board, but this guy fried the same exact processor with an X99 motherboard (might be because he bought it open box but I don't know).

Okay - I'll just dump all the information I know here so you will hopefully have a definitive answer.



So assuming I actually do need an X99 board - I've had my eye on this Gigabyte X99 motherboard mainly because It's the cheapest X99 option where I live and apparently Gigabyte has this feature on some of their motherboards called Q-Flash Plus, which lets you update the BIOS without a CPU or RAM installed.

I have also heard that this version of the processor - E5 2696 V4, is the exact same thing as the consumer grade one(E5 2699 V4) but OEM, and in addition to that, the CPU support list for this motherboard has the consumer grade version(E5 2699 V4) listed there, but doesn't have the OEM version. I'm assuming it might be because it is OEM, and they might not have all the OEM versions of CPUs listed because that would literally make the list twice as long.

I know that I know about zero percent of the information I should know to be able to handle this thing but hey - the CPU was free, so I might as well use it.

Advice highly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Eximo]

You can find the processor details here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011 under the Xeon E5-26xx v2 (dual-processor) section

Seems like you might need a board with two sockets, and likely a C612 chipset, rather than X99.

 

[melonlink]

You can find the processor details here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011 under the Xeon E5-26xx v2 (dual-processor) section

Seems like you might need a board with two sockets, and likely a C612 chipset, rather than X99.

Hi and sorry for the late response, I want a single socket motherboard because I don't have enough money to get another one of those CPUs and I didn't even have enough money to get one in the first place.

 

[Eximo]

Most dual socket motherboards support running only a single CPU. You might need a placeholder chip, though. Something to look into as the dual socket boards might actually be cheaper for being more common. There are boards with the C612 chipset that are single socket certainly.

These would all be used, new boards would be absurdly expensive.

You are still looking at several hundred dollars to get it up and running I would imagine. You can get complete i7 4th gen systems for about $250, with Windows.