I recently picked up a new Asrock Rack Epycd8-2t V2 board to mate with a used 7551P I got cheaply. Eventually I will swap out the 7551P with 7002 chip (hopefully something like the 7702P when they become obsolete).
The reason I went this route is that I have switched my file server over to NVME drives and my Threadripper 2970wx was running out of PCIE availability. On my threadripper I used two basic 4x NVME adapter cards by bifurcating the two 16x slots on the motherboard. This gave me 11 NVME drives.
The weird thing is that on my Epycd8-2t, if I use those same cards AND set the 16X slots to 4x4x4x4x just like on my threadripper, it causes all kinds of issues. One of the two boards just won’t even be recognized and the other causes windows to boot extremely slowly and Unraid just absolutely refuses to boot. Even when I get into Windows, instead of 4 drives, it just shows all 4 drives as 1 big storage device instead of 4 separate.
I’ve validated that all the PCIE lanes are working (thought maybe the Epyc chip wasn’t seated right) by setting all the PCIE slots to full width and putting other PCIE cards (mostly old quadro cards) to validate that all lanes are working (they are).
The only thing I can come up with is that bifurcation doesn’t actually work on this board OR it’s somehow broken with 1st gen Epyc? Or I am missing some setting in the bios other than the bifurcation setting? The bios is very sparse so it doesn’t look like I’ve missed anything? And yes I’m on the latest bios 2.60 and the latest BMC of 2.2.
I’ve ordered a 4 Port NVME Raid card to see if that works, but I would really rather not have to spend $600+ to replace two perfectly good cards if the motherboard just did what I would expect it to.
Link to the motherboard…
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPYCD8-2T#Manual