I recently upgraded my whitebox ESX at home with an Intel i920 and a MSI X58M motherboard. From what I've gathered, VT-D should be available on this system but the Advanced Settings page of the ESX still says that the host does not support passthrough. This is rather depressing since I was really hoping to play around with this feature.
Now, I suspect that the real culprit here is the BIOS - aparently many of the motherboards shipping with this chipset claim VT-D support but lack a BIOS capable of setting up the required ACPI tables, however MSI themselves have claimed that enabling "VT" in the BIOS should also enable VT-D.
Anyway; Curious to hear wether anyone else have managed to get PCI passthrough working using non-server hardware. Or if I am missing some vital bit of information..