Best dual socket board

Hey guys,

About to buy a computer in the next couple of days and really behind on my research. I have a buyer for my current computer but dont know what I am going to get in its place. Thinking about getting a smoking deal on ebay for a pair of 14 core CPU's. What is the best dual cpu board there is at the moment? I would also love the ability for m.2 or at least the expansion of m.2. Just wanting something as future proof as possible. Fast ram speeds etc. Also bouncing between the idea of doing a single socket board with the 6950.. but dont know if thats worth it or not.

Thanks!

For a general graphics workstation and expecially for 3D, I love dual socket boards. I've been buying them since before there were multi-core processsors. But for editing and DR specifically, I think single socket boards fitted with high (4Ghz and above) clock speed six core or better modern CPUs are probably better. This is expecially true if you intend to edit h.264 and similar media directly without creating intermediary files. However, things may be different for editing raw. I'm not sure how much processing is handled in GPU and if that varies depending on the raw format being used. If yer gonna edit raw, just ignore my post.

I think the key to happiness with DR is found in making sure you have enough GPU ram and speed and enough hard drive (think SSD or M.2 IMO) ram and speed for your intended use. So the right motherboard will be one that makes that easier by providing lots of 16x and 8x slots and flexibility in how the PCIe lanes can be allocated among the slots. BTW, with the current level of GPU performance, it is not yet important to make sure that GPU cards have access to 16 lanes in 16x slots. Current benchmarks with the fastest cards show that eight lanes works just as well. That's something to keep in mind when mulling over configuration options. In a few years, however, that may change.