I am looking to buy a new motherboard for my server and am considering the following model ASRock GENOAD8UD-2T/X550.
My previous experiences with Supermicro motherboards have been very unpleasant. The IPMI port didn’t work, the PCIe card I installed for the network didn’t appear in BIOS, and a RAID card (purchased from a trusted company) had the same issue. I could continue with more examples, but that’s not the point.
On the ASRock board, the two MCIO ports can connect to 8 SATA each. Are these SATA connections sharing the 6 GbE bandwidth, or does each SATA connection have a full 6 GbE bandwidth?
Has anyone had bad or good experiences with this board? Is the board stable?
Does the 550XT 10 GbE controller tend to overheat easily? On the Supermicro board, the Broadcom controller heats up significantly without server-grade cooling.
Regarding cooling, will the ASRock board function well with standard airflow? Any experiences or advice?
Has anyone used an ASRock server board with an EPYC CPU for multiple years in a non-server case environment?
Has anyone experienced an ASRock board with an EPYC CPU failing unexpectedly?
What challenges should I expect when dealing with ASRock environments?
How well is a setup using this board and 16 Micron 5400 SSD going to perform? Will I be able to saturate 25 GbE / more / less?
The PSU that I have, has only 2 ATX power connectors, is there a way to deal with this?
Would it be possible to share a link of a good MCIO to 8 SATA cable?
Declaimer: I don’t have that board, but I’ve used ASrockRack Rome/Milan boards in the past (and some Xeon ones).
That one. On all EPYC generations, one of the “SERDES” ports supports both PCIe and SATA, and SATA is supported by turning one of those RX/TX lanes into a SATA lane, repeated 8 or 16 times. The topology diagram in the manual gives a clue:
The X550 on the Rome boards was the hottest component, even with the relatively large heatsink. The heatsink on the Genoa board looks smaller, so I guess it would get hot too, but I’ve never had it not functioning because of heat issues. I’d recommend maybe at least a small fan pointing at the heatsink but I dont think you’d need crazy cooling.
A ROMED8-2T in a Fractal Design Meshify, and a ROMED4ID-2T in a Lian Li mini-ITX case here. A common sentiment was that the VRMs would cook themselves unless I had datacenter-grade deafening airflow, but that was not the case at all - with the gentle breeze of a few Noctuas, the hottest temp is 48C (from a FLIR), and the finger test would seem to agree.
Apparently the virtual CD-ROM support provided by some IPMI/BMC versions is slow, I haven’t used it to confirm.
