Does anyone know if any of the ASRock boards allow for adjustment of the PCIE slots priority posting?
After doing nearly 2 months of research, it certainly seemed as if nearly all the VT-d compatible prosumer motherboards were X99, had NO integrated on-board graphics, and had multiple PCIE slots. And so, what does this imply? Well... it seems to imply that PCIE slots should be assignable, even to the initial post splash screen... right??
I was back and forth on Extreme4 vs TaiChi vs Gigabyte boards... watched multiple reviews... even almost went for SuperMicro but I couldn't find anyone who could update the BIOS for a Xeon v4 since I don't have a v3 laying around... TaiChi had a BIOS ready for v4 Broadwell... so I bought it and put everything together KNOWING that I was going to be using it for virtualization. (I like the UnRaid hypervisor software... kicks major ass).
But guess what? The TaiChi does not have a BIOS that allows you to run the post of the splash to any PCIE slot except PCIE2!!! So essentially, the ASRock motherboard designer is saying: "F YOU! This PCIE slot is MINE! You are not allowed to use it for ANY virtualization features WHATSOEVER!!! HAHAHAHA! You thought your Intel chip could handle that, didn't you?! Well I WON'T LET IT!! AAAAH HAHAHA"
So anyway, is this standard along ALL of the X99 boards??? I actually bought a PCIE x1 craptastic video card so that I could post to the minimum number of PCIE lanes on the least graphically intense screen that the computer will ever have to post... cause that would be the smart thing to do, right? Wrong... cause if you wanted to run VMs, then when you buy this ASRock TaiChi motherboard, you actually end up having 16 PCIE lanes taken away from you. You can't use them. The motherboard needs them for the splash screen and the BIOS config utility. Yeah. 16 PCIE lanes for the BIOS. Shove that up your pie-hole.
So again... does anyone know if there is any MB at ASRock that allows this change from the default PCIE slot for the splash?
------------- UnRaid enthusiast
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