Asrocks new C2750 & C2550 boards (12 SATA ports and IPMI).

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RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
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I know there has been a bit of Avoton talik already but have not seen any mention of ASRocks two new boards.

C2750D4I

Intel® Avoton C2750 Octa-Core (8 core) Processor.
4x Ram slots (up to 32GB supported).
12 SATA ports (2 SATA3 6.0Gbps, 4 SATA2 3.0Gbps by C2550, 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9230, 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9172)
Dual Intel® i210 Gigabit LAN ports (with Teaming function)
3 x USB 2.0 ports (2 rear ports + 1 via headers or 1 rear ports + 2 via headers controlled by USB_SEL1 and USB_SEL2 jumper)
1 x PCI-E x8 slot
ASPEED AST2300 : IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) 2.0 with iKVM support

C2550D4I
Intel® Avoton C2550 Quad-Core Processor
DDR3 1600/133 Dual-channel Max. 32GB
12 SATA (SATA3 6.0Gbps, 4 SATA2 3.0Gbps by C2550, 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9230, 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9172)
Dual Intel® i210 Gigabit LAN ports (with Teaming function)
3 x USB 2.0 ports (2 rear ports + 1 via headers or 1 rear ports + 2 via headers controlled by USB_SEL1 and USB_SEL2 jumper)
1 x PCI-E x8 slot
ASPEED AST2300 : IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) 2.0 with iKVM support via dedicated realtek lan port.

So, upto 8 cores for the C2750, up to 32GB ram, 12 SATA ports, dual lan, IPMI with KVMoIP, a PCIe x8 slot and ESXi 5.1 is a supported OS (along with Windows server 2008r2 / 2012, CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and SUSE).

Oh the possibilities...

Just trying to get pricing now.

RB
 

vegaman

Member
Sep 12, 2013
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Of course these boards all got announced after I ordered a Haswell motherboard lol.
The Intel NICs on these could make for nice little storage boxes. I assume they also support ECC?
I think for me the SuperMicro offerings look more attractive though, the quad GbE would make for nice edge boxes.

Interested in pricing too, so far I've only seen a couple of places with the SuperMicro boards, and they're $550-600... I was thinking maybe $250.
 

RimBlock

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Sep 18, 2011
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Of course these boards all got announced after I ordered a Haswell motherboard lol.
The Intel NICs on these could make for nice little storage boxes. I assume they also support ECC?
I think for me the SuperMicro offerings look more attractive though, the quad GbE would make for nice edge boxes.

Interested in pricing too, so far I've only seen a couple of places with the SuperMicro boards, and they're $550-600... I was thinking maybe $250.
Horses for courses I think.

The ASRock with 12 SATA ports looks like a great small SAN / NAS box and with ESXi compatibility it could be used for a great little virtualization server.

The Supermicro still has 6 SATA ports and 4 lan ports but they are Marvell rather than Intel. Not sure if they will be supported by ESXi (if that is the buyers interest). Sor a network router, firewall appliance units core it looks pretty good.

Will update on pricing when I find out.

Regards
RB
 

sotech

Member
Jul 13, 2011
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Would love to know pricing on these - really interesting boards! Seems like it is a good time to be playing with server gear, the next couple of years should be really interesting with more releases like these.
 

33_viper_33

Member
Aug 3, 2013
204
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As I stated in the SM thread, which someone would produce a board like this with a mPCIe slot for wireless AP. This would make a sweet router/nas/iscsi host box for remote boot with a 10gbe card in the PCIe slot.
 

modernist

New Member
Aug 28, 2013
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These boards definitely look interesting. Is there any info on whether Avoton supports VT-d? I don't see it in the specs, but sometimes the Intel info can be a little ambiguous.
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
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What CPU is that?
Intel Atom C2570 (8 core)

Intel Atom C2550 (4 core)

@Modernist - Yep that is the question and, as you mentioned, Intel do seems to be very careful with the specs it gives out. There is no tech specs released yet by Intel (to the public domain at least) and they usually give the greatest hint if it is not clearly stated pn the product page. VT-d also needs BIOS support so even if it is supported it may not be supported on a specific motherboard. Quite a confusing situation really...

RB
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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Horses for courses I think.

The ASRock with 12 SATA ports looks like a great small SAN / NAS box and with ESXi compatibility it could be used for a great little virtualization server.

The Supermicro still has 6 SATA ports and 4 lan ports but they are Marvell rather than Intel. Not sure if they will be supported by ESXi (if that is the buyers interest). Sor a network router, firewall appliance units core it looks pretty good.

Will update on pricing when I find out.

Regards
RB
They are not Marvel. It is a Marvel PHY chip converting SGMII to 1GbE copper.

Why did they put two ICs on the board when a single PHY chip would get to the same ends.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Just as an update - no firm word on when these will be available but it sounds like somewhere in the October-December timeframe with the C2750 coming out first.

I would expect these on Newegg when they arrive.
 

RimBlock

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Sep 18, 2011
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Pricing here in Singapore is around (depending on retailer markup;
US$350 mark for the ASRock C2550
US$450 mark for the ASRock C2750

They are both out in November here.

RB
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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How is the support for those Marvell controllers in ESXi 5.5? I would also love to see if those work with Proxmox VE which we have been talking about on the forums. It would be a great storage platform for the colocation.
 

33_viper_33

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Aug 3, 2013
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How is the support for those Marvell controllers in ESXi 5.5? I would also love to see if those work with Proxmox VE which we have been talking about on the forums. It would be a great storage platform for the colocation.
Check out the main site. Patrick just did an article on this very subject and a how to to get around the lack of ESXI 5.5 driver support.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Rumor has it an ASRock C2750D4I sample is headed our way for testing. More to come.
 

Patrick

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Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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C2750D4I

Intel® Avoton C2750 Octa-Core (8 core) Processor.
4x Ram slots (up to 32GB supported).
12 SATA ports (2 SATA3 6.0Gbps, 4 SATA2 3.0Gbps by C2550, 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9230, 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9172)
Dual Intel® i210 Gigabit LAN ports (with Teaming function)
3 x USB 2.0 ports (2 rear ports + 1 via headers or 1 rear ports + 2 via headers controlled by USB_SEL1 and USB_SEL2 jumper)
1 x PCI-E x8 slot
ASPEED AST2300 : IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) 2.0 with iKVM support
Just got a pre-release sample in the lab! Stay tuned.

A few notes:

  • No fan on this one. It does use a larger heatsink than the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F. I am going to see if it can be run passively.
  • There are dual Intel i210 NICs rather than the quad port solution. There is a dedicated network port
  • 12 SATA ports on the board makes it SUPER interesting for a NAS environment
  • The C2750D4I has a 24-pin ATX connector rather than a 24-pin + 4 pin CPU connector found on the Supermicro
  • The full DDR3 DIMM slots are a nice feature

More to come!
 

okashira

New Member
Oct 4, 2013
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I would like to know if you can run FREENAS on these. Will it support the ethernet, and other controllers?

Also test ZFS performance: scrub, rebuild, ethernet transfers with RAID z2

Thank you