AMD Epyc Rome Motherboard Recommendations

Hardware Build a PC
1

I got a good deal on a 7302P so I’m looking for a single socket board. I’m based in the UK.

I don’t think PCIe 4 is critical. But it’s nice! I saw the H11SSL but I can’t find one that is reasonably priced without importing from the US.

Looking at putting some GPUs (1 just now), NVMe drives, and I have an infiniband card (older, not that high of bandwidth) that I will use for point to point communication with another machine.

Any tips or suggestions?

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Subscribing, interested in hearing what’s up from folks in the know.

Strangely there seems to be few DIY choices for PCIe 4.0 Rome boards… Are they skipping 4.0 and waiting for 5.0?

3

What I’ve found from my research:

  • Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 (rev 2). Limited to 4 x16 PCIe 3 slots, has some x8. E-ATX
  • Supermicro H11SSL-{I,NC,C} (Rev 2). Limited to 3 x16 PCIe slots has some x8. ATX. Differences are SAS/SATA/NVMe ports.
  • Supermicro’s H12 series, only available in proprietary form factors just now, but an ATX board will be out next quarter. They have PCIe 4.
  • ASRock EPYCD8 (another Naples board). Limited to 4 x16 PCIe slots, have some x8. ATX.
  • Tyan S8030 boards. 5 x16 PCIe 4 slots. ATX. One version has 2x 10 Gbe

The winner form me is the Tyan board, but I’m unfamiliar with them and haven’t seen it for sale anywhere yet.

Runners up are the Supermicro H11 board (I’ve used Supermicro before and the H11 boards have ATX versions) or the ASRock board.

4

That Tyan board looks great, definitely aimed at building a workstation versus a server. They don’t specify if the NVME / slimSAS ports are pcie 4.0 or 3.0

The last Tyan boards I purchased were about ten years ago, low end Xeon boards. They still work, which I guess is good? I wonder how long the wait will be for the “Coming Soon” to turn into “Buy Now”

5

I also subscribe to another channel called STH serve the home , check out their website for some good information as well… They do massive amounts of research and testing and have some great suggestions for all price ranges.

6

Hi,

The GIgabyte MZ32-AR0 has PCIe 4 support for 7002 series cpus.

ASRock has a ROMED8-T2 in the wings, which is a 7x16 PCIe gen4(!) dual 10GbE behemoth, with slot 2 sacrificing itself if one adds NVMe or OCuLink etc.

Currently my top choice, as TRX40 with 4 slots only is a huge disappointment.

Supermicro said it would be introducing more H12 boards supporting PCIe gen4 in Q1, and there is still the rumour that W/TRX80 may emerge in Q1, but I may jump for the ASRock board when it is properly available.

7

I have the Supermicro H11SSL-NC and would not reccomend it. You will have to add a NIC to get networking speed deserving of the CPU the board holds. The IPMI license-gates the updating of BIOS from IPMI. My far cheaper ASROCK Rack Ryzen server boards give that to me for free. The customer support is on par with that I received with ASROCK Rack boards: none. The HBA of the board only officially supports the “who would use this?” settings of Supermicro RAID ( I was able to flash mine to IT mode, but was told to take a hike by the support reps when requesting even the most basic of documentation regarding the HBA).

If you go Epyc, it deserves the best…it deserves…Fancy Feast.

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8

Can Joe Sixpack buy one though? I get the impression Gigabyte is only sending them to YouTube personalities to hype up ROME? I don’t see them for sale on Newegg, Amazon or Provantage.

9

I have not seen one online since the Nixon Administration…

10

Did you look hard enough? This came as my first result.

11

That’s a MZ31, not MZ32.

MZ32 supports 7002 and PCIe gen4, whereas the MZ31, above, only supports gen3.

1 Like
12

I apologize.
Apparently there’s a Rev 2.0 of MZ31 that supports Epyc 7002? Perhaps that’ll be easier to find? Since OP doesn’t seems to find pcie gen 4 critical…

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