Intel's i7-5960X + X99 Motherboard On CentOS 7.0 Has Some Pains

For those that may have picked up the incredibly-fast, $1000+ Intel Core i7 5960X CPU with a new required motherboard bearing the X99 chipset, be prepared for potential troubles if you're planning to install CentOS 7.0.

With the Core i7 5960X and MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard setup I was planning to run some CentOS 7.0 performance benchmarks from this eight-core (plus HT) benchmarks now that I've got many Ubuntu and Fedora tests under my belt for this beautiful rig. Sadly, it didn't go too far once hitting the Anaconda installer.

With this new system, the CentOS 7.0 x86_64 release didn't fully support the hardware. The USB mouse didn't work at all (for what it's worth was a ROCCAT Lua), the Gigabit Ethernet wasn't detected, and the installation process crashed for unknown reasons. The installation target was to an Intel 530 Series M.2 SSD.

Besides CentOS 7.0, this experience is likely the case with other Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 derivatives too like Scientific Linux 7.0. Once I have more time to play around with EL7 on the i7-5960X + X99 (or if EL 7.1 gets released first), I'll try again to see how it goes.