ASRock Rack 1U2E-C252 Intel Xeon E-2300 1U Server Review

ASRock Rack 1U2E-C252 Power Consumption

The power supply is a 315W 80Plus Gold unit.

We saw an idle of around 30W. We saw maximum power consumption of around 130W with an Intel Xeon E-2378G CPU and a single SSD. These systems with higher-end CPUs and high-end NVMe can exceed the maximum power of inexpensive 1A 110V/120V hosting plans. There are lower power processors in the 65W TDP range that one would likely not have to worry about. There is also less pressure on the system power since one cannot add PCIe cards to this system. Some PCIe cards like DPUs and accelerators can use 75W alone rivaling CPUs, but this system is not designed for higher-end configurations like that. Our sense is that the practical maximum one would expect to see in a server like this is ~200W.

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.0C and 67% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance.

STH Server Spider ASRock Rack 1U2E-C252

In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.

This server is not designed to be the densest. Instead, it is designed to provide a platform that accomplishes a few main tasks. Namely, that is combining:

• A low-cost Intel Xeon E-2300 CPU
• Memory for that CPU
• 0-2 data drives and a boot drive
• 1GbE networking
• IPMI for management

That is really it. ASRock Rack optimized its platform around a requirement list that is something like the above and that is exactly what this server delivers.

Final Words

The ASRock Rack 1U2E-C252 is very different from the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-ICX/2T Review 1U Intel Xeon Ice Lake Hosting Node even though one may think of them as similar in some ways. The server platform cost is usually about 30% less between those two 1P platform options. Those savings increase significantly once CPU and memory are added and power consumption is taken into account.

With the Intel Xeon Ice Lake Era no longer including a Xeon Bronze offering, the Intel Xeon E-2300 series has expanded its range. Offering 8 cores and 16 threads with high clock speeds means one can opt for the lower-cost platform rather than moving into the Xeon Silver range for the low-end segment. That is exactly the market that ASRock Rack is going after with this system.

Overall, the system worked as we would expect and the performance and power were in-line with expectations. This is not a server for every segment. If you want high-speed networking, lots of cores, or big AI accelerators/ storage configurations, then this is not the right option. If you just want a compact low-cost 1U, then the 1U2E-C252 is very well designed for that market.