Although the days of Intel’s Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs are rapidly approaching, the reality is that DDR5 pricing will keep a substantial portion of the market on the 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable (codenamed “Ice Lake”) for some time. To that end, we have a 1U platform, the ASRock Rack 1U10E-ICX2, that is designed as a dual-socket 1U server that takes advantage of Ice Lake’s lower platform cost with up to 32 DDR4 DIMMs and PCIe Gen4.
ASRock Rack 1U10E-ICX2 External Hardware Overview
The system is a 1U server at only about a 31″ or 800mm depth. That is far from the deepest 1U dual socket server we have seen to date.
The right front has our power button and status LEDs.
The right has two USB Type-A ports.
There are 10x 2.5″ NVMe drive bays on the front of this system. At one point, we tested it with an array of Intel Optane P5800X 800GB drives just to see if they would overheat, but they did not. One nice feature is that all of the drive trays are now toolless so swapping ten drives takes a fraction of the time it would in older systems with four screws per drive.
The rear of the system is dominated by IO and power supplies.
Standard I/O on the server is provided by an out-of-band management port, two USB Type-A ports, a VGA, and a serial port. The slot next to the Power and ID is an OCP NIC 3.0 slot.
Above that are two risers. Each is a PCIe Gen4 x16 full-height riser, and they are identical. Something nice in this generation is that ASRock Rack has a toolless design to remove the risers. at this point, we wish all servers had this.
The redundant power supplies are 1.6kW Delta CRPS units.
Overall, this is a fairly standard 1U 10x 2.5″ package. Let us get inside the system to see more.
Regarding the extra PCIe x16 slot:
Maybe one of these fits:
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=RB1U2M2_G4
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=RB1U4M2_G4
If you aren’t going to throw out your servers/workstations every 8 to 12 months to buy new ones. Stay Far away from Asrock. Their support is awful. Almost like they are advised against providing any form of service for products older than a year. Huge part of buying these products at their high prices is to be able to used them as long as possible. We have had so many Asrock servers and now server boards die for the past 2 years. Especially their EPYC line. God awful company.