As the title suggest, Asus has not released a bios for broadwell-ep xeon support, but only for the broadwell-e i7s.
Other AIBs like asrock and so on have support for the xeons on their x99 boards, whilst Asus is the only one who hasn't. There is no physical limitation on their boards that keeps broadwell-ep xeons from running on their boards, only that they haven't "enabled" it.
Was really upset that my xeon only posts on the sabertooth if I reset the cmos each time I want to start it, but it works just fine in windows without any stability issues or weird behavior.
I sent a ticket to asus a month ago and all I got in response was "At this moment there is unfortuantely no Xeon V4 support on the Sabertooth X99 motherboard. I have forwarded your request to our headquarter however I can't say if or when an update will be available."
The non-workstation and enterprise motherboards don't support Xeons with Asus because it would nullify the reason to have workstation and enterprise market motherboards that are more expensive than the gaming and cheap ones. It's more of a matter of financials than it is if they can or can't enable it in bios.
The consumer boards don't have ECC support along with some other features. All X99 boards from asus support the older V3 xeons, so not supporting V4 is really weird.
If they don't add Xeon support for the older boards when there is nothing on a hardware level that keeps them from doing so, and launch refresh x99 with Xeon V4 support I swear I'll cut someone.
That's a really garbage thing to do to your users if this is true.
The best way to do it is to not buy their shit. Money is power. If enough boards aren't moving because of lack of a feature they will put that feature in
So it turns out that the new boards have the same problem reported on the Sabertooth X99, and I was able to replicate the problem on my Sabertooth X99. There is a bleeding-edge UEFI I have been asked to try. I have escalated the issue and asus HQ is going to look into it when they return to the office next week on like.. Wednesday somewhere though there.
Thanks, so they're going to look into it instead of ignoring it to milk their new boards. Good to hear. I was about to start taking the microcode packages from the WS board and swapping it into the sabertooth, I guess I don't have to risk it then.
it has batch/stepping/etc info about the cpu.. it may be a bug in the microcode updates from intel, or possibly you have an early engineering sample cpu.. they are working on replicating the issue
Good news bad news. Good news is that I have an ES that works, but its the final/release version. Bad news its that the other ES CPUs we have are not going to be supported on Asus boards. "Sometimes Intel changes the microcode so that the newest microcode locks out the older ES steppings..." so, not probably not on purpose, but we're SOL on these boards with ES cpus.
You might want to try supermicro boards before they lockout ES, so far I have no problem running dual xeon ES broadwell on it. I havent upgraded the bios on it yet ( Im afraid that cpus might not be supported hehe) but you might have to change ram ( if its not supported).
