ASRock AM4 Rack X570D4U-2L2T

Product Information

These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, as well as trace, captures from different VDI environments. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. This change of mind return policy is in addition to, and does not affect your rights under the Australian Consumer Law including any rights you may have in respect of faulty items. To return faulty items see our Returning Faulty Items policy.

SLOT5: PCIe4.0 * x1 [FCH] *Supports PCIe3.0 when using AMD Ryzen™ 5000, 4000 and 3000 G-Series Desktop Processors with Radeon™ Graphics

Along the front are four bays for hot-swapping 3.5” or 2.5” SATA drives. This will go a long way for adding capacity while keeping the price down. Assuming you want to max out capacity on this guy, four bays isn’t enough. The good news is that there are three more internal 2.5” bays. These bays are fixed, not swappable, and they too are SATA. This gives users even more options for adding low-cost capacity ideally with 2.5” SSDs or slim HDDs if you must. Since this is based on Ryzen, it is a single NUMA node design. AMD EPYC 7001 8-core servers, such as those based on the AMD EPYC 7251 had four NUMA nodes which created a lot of inter-die traffic. With Ryzen, one does not have to worry about that on these lower-cost platforms. When it comes to benchmarking storage arrays, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparisons between competing solutions. Ok, so this board is not perfect. I will start with what I believe to be a design flaw that I currently suffer through, but that may be a deal breaker for many prospect buyers. There is a fundamental and inherent layout and power delivery design incompatibility: you have three PCIe lanes that fight for space and electronics, and there are no ideal configurations to maximize the potential of this board. In the mATX form factor, it is good to have 4x DIMM slots, 2x full length PCIe slots (more on this later), and a 4x PCIe slot, as well as 2x M.2 slots, 8x SATA ports, TONS of fan headers, and more miscellaneous pinned headers at the foot than I know what to do with. This board could service a full tower of parts, and again is a little staggering in versatility.

Whilst there seems to be a lot of bad points, I have managed to overcome all of them, with the exception of the RAM which I hope will be fixed with a BIOS update. I’ll look into a better LSI HBA option…open to recommendations as I can’t say I am very familiar with their line. That was supposed to read LSI 9207 by the way – sorry for the typo! Or maybe I just use a breakout cable on the second port of that card with SFF-8087 to SATA so I can pass through some SATA SSDs…not sure if there is a way to pass through NVME that way. This board draws power efficiently, idling with a GTX 1660 super, 4x enterprise SAS hard drives, 2x NVME drives, 2x SSDs, a Ryzen 5 1600, 2x fans, and a AIO CPU cooler at a mere 40 watts. Its chipset handles heat well: I have seen 0 meaningful throttling at hot-but-not-alarming temperatures. Second, the electronics. The primary and secondary PCIe slots share 16x worth of lanes. This is absurd! If you have anything plugged into the second 16x slot, all 8x of its power is robbed from the primary 16x slot, and not from the 4x where you might expect. This means that you have to choose between your GPU getting its full bandwidth and power OR running an expansion card on the secondary physical 16x lane and having both cards operate at 8x power. This is a massive flaw in my opinion, even if it only affects some users. I cannot think of a good reason why the lanes are allocated like this rather than isolating the primary 16x lane and netting a little extra power to split 12x across the remaining slots. Our first local-storage application benchmark consists of a Percona MySQL OLTP database measured via SysBench. This test measures average TPS (Transactions Per Second), average latency, and average 99th percentile latency as well.

So, BMC functionality is there and works pretty well, at least the web management interface. SSH allows only a single session at a time and my system thinks it has an existing active session when it does not. Haven't tried sol. The remote KVM works. I have not tried to install an OS onto the server using the BMC but that is supported by the web interface. Supports PCIe3.0 x16 when using AMD Ryzen™ 5000, 4000 G-Series Desktop Processors with Radeon™ Graphics The above usage scenario still leaves me with one available open-ended PCIe x4 slot for expansion, which is not bad at all.