I don’t think I would buy a board unless it had 10Gb or 25Gb built in. But the MCIO is interesting.
Availability seem to be given as far as I can see…370-380ish. Certainly not rare anymore here.
on-board NIC isn’t free. And you need a chipset. There are a bunch of boards with on-board 25Gbit available, but usually have a +300 price tag for all that. This board is stripped down to the minimum and has 24 very flexible CPU lanes.
The slot is for 25/100 Gbit NIC, the other lanes are for MCIO and/or M.2. You don’t get more CPU lanes with other boards costing double the price and MCIO saves a lot of headache and money if you want to use U.2 drives.
Remains unobtainium here. ASRock Rack availability’s currently the greatest I’ve ever noticed, actually, but effectively the only AM5 option is B650D4U3-2L2T/BCM. (There’s also B650D4U-2L2T/BCM if you feel like buying a board that’ll fail.)
Hi @Exard3k
Would you mind to list the available bifurcation options for this board? I am wondering if the PCIe slot can be bifurcated to x4x4x4x4.
My intended use would be 5 U.2 drives and 1 25Gbe Nic. Therefore I was thinking about:
2 U.2 via MCIO 1
2 U.2 via PCIe 5.0 x8 to MCIO 8i adapter (in the physical x16 slot of the board)
1 U.2 via MCIO 2 (leaves one M.2 active)
1 25Gbe via M.2 to PCIe 5.0 x4 adapter
The “Slot” is the physical slot and the last 8 lanes can be assigned to the MCIO port. So I use x8x4x4 to get 8 lanes for the NIC in the slot + 2x U.2 for MCIO.
Fairly easy and plug&play. Don’t know how x4x4x4x4 works, as I only ever used my config.
Wait, what’s the difference between B650D4U3-2L2T/BCM and B650D4U-2L2T/BCM? I can’t find any info on this
The 3 is a newer revision.