Gigabyte Intel Xeon E-2200 Platforms Updated

Hot on the heels of this week’s re-launch of the Intel Xeon E-2200 series, we have more platform updates. Generally, with platforms like the entry-level Intel Xeon series, there are few if any new platforms when new chips come out. Instead, the Gigabyte Intel Xeon E-2200 series platforms are enabled via a BIOS update. With this generation, that BIOS update can mean adding 33% more cores and clock speeds that reach 5.0GHz (e.g. with the Intel Xeon E-2288G) which is a big upgrade.

Gigabyte Intel Xeon E-2200 Platforms Updated

Since this is an article around the server re-launch, not the actual release of the Xeon E-2200 series five months ago, we are going to focus on the Gigabyte Intel Xeon E-2200 server platforms instead of workstation products.

Gigabyte MX32-4L0

The Gigabyte MX32-4L0 is a mATX motherboard that now includes support for the new Xeon E-2200 series. One gets 8x SATA III, an ASPEED BMC for out-of-band management, as well as an M.2 and two PCIe slots.

Perhaps the most fun aspect of the Gigabyte MX32-4L0 motherboard is that 4L stands for quad LAN ports.

Gigabyte MX32-BS0

Looking to shave costs, there is a MX32 variant that is more cost-optimized. That is the “BS0” model which stands for “basic saver.”

With this model, one loses two LAN ports as well as two SATA ports but there are still features like dual LAN and a BMC for IPMI. The basic saver model also downgrades from the C246 PCH found on the MX32-4L0 and replaces it with the lower cost Intel C242 PCH which drives some of the other feature changes.

Motherboards like the Gigabyte MX32-BS0 are popular in this segment as one can purchase low-cost server motherboards and pair them with higher-end CPUs or even lower-end models like the sub-$100 Intel Core i3-9100F to produce ultra-low-cost server nodes.