Gigabyte has a new motherboard for the Intel Xeon E-2300 series. The Gigabyte MX33-BS0 is designed for cost-optimized deployments. Let us take a quick look at what Gigabyte did along those lines.
Gigabyte MX33-BS0 mATX Intel Xeon E-2300 Series Motherboard
As we would expect, we have the new Intel socket LGA1200 for the Rocket Lake-E Xeon E-2300 series. We also have four DIMM slots, so Gigabyte is still enabling full CPU and memory footprints in this platform.
While many of the higher-end boards we are seeing from other vendors are adopting 10Gbase-T either with the Intel X550 or X710, Gigabyte has dual Intel i210 NICs. These 1GbE NICs are still a step up from what we have seen some other vendors do use the Intel i219 integrated PCH NIC. Intel has been pushing its server vendors away from the integrated i219, so this is a good move by Gigabyte. If you look at the platform overview slide, Intel does not even list the i219 MAC instead listing only the i210 and better.
Gigabyte has two PCIe Gen4 slots both from the CPU and the x4 M.2 slot is a PCIe Gen3 slot from the PCH. Since the PCH is an Intel C252, we only get six SATA III lanes.
Overall, this is about what we would expect from a single-socket Intel C252 platform in terms of a block diagram.
Final Words
Gigabyte is certainly focused on the lower-cost segment for its Intel Xeon E-2300 series launch platform. The challenge that the Xeon E faces in the industry is that investing a lot in the Xeon E-2300 other than to get an inexpensive high-frequency set of a few cores starts to run into different segments. While other vendors are trying to push the Xeon E-2300 into the Xeon Silver market with higher-end motherboards, Gigabyte is maintaining that this is an entry platform. That makes sense from a segmentation perspective.
