ASRock Server Motherboards for Haswell Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 Processors

ASRock is aggressively pursuing the server market. With the launch of the new Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 series processors, ASRock released several server motherboards. The new Haswell Intel Xeon generation based on socket LGA1150 provides ASRock with the ability to take their knowledge from the desktop space and transfer it to the server market. ASRock seems to be focusing on the mid-range to higher-end segment as all of their motherboard offerings for the new Haswell Intel Xeons utilize either the C224 or C226 PCH instead of the lower cost C222.

Here is a quick summary of the ASRock Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 Haswell series server motherboard lineup:

Note: We still do not have an image of the C226 based mini ITX server motherboard. That is sure to be an interesting option for many applications, especially if vPro and Intel AMT are enabled. We did notice that ASRock has a C226 WS model that is an ATX form factor for the workstation market, but this is not the mini ITX board noted above.

ASRock has a half width solution in the ASRock E3C224D4H. The motherboard has an onboard LSI SAS2308 SAS/ SATA 6.0gbps controller along with an Intel C224 chipset. At half width, ASRock fits the E3C224D4H in a side-by-side configuration in a 2U chassis. That allows each server to access more disks than if they were in a 1U server but also allows ASRock to provide redundant PSUs and more efficient cooling in the 2U form factor. The Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 series is based on Haswell so this configuration has the possibility of idling at very low power consumption levels. One really interesting feature of the ASRock E3C224D4H is that the motherboard has standard ATX power connectors. Many vendors have moved to proprietary connectors for their half-width designs so it is great to see ASRock use an industry standard connectors.

ASRock also has standard width motherboards for the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 series. The ASRock E3C224-4L is a standard ATX motherboard size. It has a few unique features namely that it utilizes a Marvell 9172 SATA controller for additional SATA 6.0gbps ports beyond the four ports provided by the chipset. Further the ASRock E3C224-4L has four Intel i210 network controllers and an IPMI management port.

All of the ASRock models are using the Aspeed AST2300 BMC. That gives the ability to provide remote management functionality via IPMI 2.0. This includes such features as KVM-over-IP. As we have seen with the Haswell generation of Xeon E3-1200 motherboards, all of ASRock’s server motherboards are using the Intel i210 gigabit Ethernet controllers.

More to come on the new server motherboards released with Haswell.