ASRock Rack has been releasing several small form factor LGA2011 motherboards lately, including the just released ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-2T8R. This is perhaps one of the most intriguing mATX form factor boards we have ever seen. The motherboard packs a huge number of features into an extremely small package (given the functionality).
ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-2T8R Quick Overview
Like the ASRock Rack EPC612D4I we just reviewed the ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-2T8R has a single narrow ILM LGA2011-3 socket. That supports one Xeon E5 processor in the mATX form factor. There are four DIMM slots, however one can use DDR4 RDIMMs making it similar to a Xeon D platform in terms of memory. 64GB should be inexpensive to attain while 128GB is more expensive but easy to hit on this platform.
Perhaps the most interesting side though is the expansion possibilities. The ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-2T8R has an Intel X540 dual 10Gbase-T controller and a LSI/ Avago SAS3008 8-port 12gbps SAS controller built-in. It also has 8x Intel C612 PCH based SATA ports for a total of sixteen storage ports availiable.
Beyond the onbaord I/O there are three PCIe slots. Two of which are PCIe 3.0 x16 and one is a PCIe 3.0 x8. For those counting, that means there are 40x PCIe lanes available via slots and one would assume at least 12 lanes between the SAS3008 and X540. Hopefully we will get a review unit to see how ASRock is managing the PCIe lanes since there are only 40x PCIe 3.0 lanes available off of the CPU.
For those looking at single socket platforms, 2015 has been a banner year between the small form factor Xeon E5 platforms ASRock Rack has been producing, the Xeon D, and what we will see soon on the lower end Xeon E3 and C2000 lineups later this year.
Crazy little motherboard. I started drooling.
I can’t wait to see what you guys find on teh PCIe lanes. No way they have PCIe 3.0 to the SAS, NIC and all of those slots.
It’d be crazy if they took a giant PCIe switch and made a NVMe array.
Holy fuck, looks like perfection, does it have any IPMI or other vKVM support?
It does have IPMI and a dedicated management port.
According to the manual’s block diagram, separate 8-lane PCI-e gen 3.0 links feeds the LSI 3008 and the Intel NICs. Unfortunately, according to the same manual, only one of the x16 slots is capable of using 16-lanes. One of the x16 slots is only connected with 8-lanes. Another shares 8-lanes with other x16 slot through a PCIe switch.
I caution that the information above was contained in manual I downloaded a few weeks ago, i.e. before this announcement, when I was looking at the EPC612D4U. The configuration might have changed since that manual was published.
I hope that you can get a board for review. I’m considering another version of the board for a home server.
Patrick,
This board is awesome. Onboard LSI 3008, very nice! now if only high density ddr4 ecc would fall in price.
ram: 4 of these is 1600 bucks, plus a e5-16xx and this board, pretty powerful setup for around 3k
There’s an ASM1480 PCIe switch onboard.
Check out the block diagram on page 22 of the manual.
http://download.asrock.com/manual/EPC612D4U-2T8R.pdf
Would be very interested if this system board EPC612D4U-2T8R could load and run illumos based OS like openindiana, smartos, or omnios directly, e.g. no hypervisor. And if so if there are any driver support issues.