$29 Embedded Epyc 3151 ASRock Rack EPYC3151D4I-NL

[Fritz]

As said, it is intended to be used in a rack enclosure with rack case fans.
TDP drops from 45 W to 35 W if SMT is disabled in BIOS. But the I/O die of these embedded EPYC still uses more power at idle than a comparable Xeon D-1521.

They're also slower.

 

[Johnson]

Much slower for sure

 

[WANg]

They're also slower.

No - the 3151 puts in numbers similar to the Ryzen V1756B, and that machine beats the quadcore, eight-thread Xeon D-1521. It’ll lose against the octacore, 16 thread D-1541, but then the D15xx series are all Broadwell based, while the Zen 1s go up against Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake chips.

 

[Cruzader]

Feels like its not worth going older than the D2143it from the cheap dattos like this one for the xeon D series (comes with this mobo).

 

[WANg]

Feels like its not worth going older than the D2143it from the cheap dattos like this one for the xeon D series (comes with this mobo).

Depends on your use case, your stash of old parts and what you are planning to replace. The Epyc 3151 is probably a good board to replace a board with a Haswell Xeon (say, like an E5 1230v3) or a low wattage Skylake Xeon (any of the Xeon Bronze 3000s or like a 1260L v5).

This is prefaced with “if you have idle DDR4 server RAM modules and storage just sitting around wasting space”. @Patrick did make a case study out of the Dell EMC VEP4600, which is 500 bucks for an entire working machine with 64GB of DDR4 server RAM. That 16 core, 32 thread D2187NT chews up about 110 watts of power but is roughly the same performance ballpark as the 8 core, 16 thread Ryzen 7 6850U pulling 28w on an HP Elitebook 845 G9. Of course, getting 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 SODIMM for that 845G9 will probably cost at least 700 today (it was about 225 in early 2025), but hey, that VEP4600 can do, what, 256GB maxed out on 32GB DIMMs? That's nothing to sneeze at for a home lab and the power draw will take a while to match/exceed the pricing on something more modern, even when the power efficiency is factored in.

 

[Markess]

....This is prefaced with “if you have idle DDR4 server RAM modules and storage just sitting around wasting space”.

This! ^^^

In my case, I had literally everything I needed, RAM, storage, OCuLink cable, power, cooling for the heatsink, a networking solution, etc., "just sitting around wasting space." I was able to pack 10 SSDs into a small cube chassis for the (additional ) price of just the motherboard itself. I'm pretty certain I'm the exception though.

It's really not economical for folks that would need to buy literally everything else to set one of these up. But if you have DDR4 RDIMMs, its not a bad choice, especially if you only need a few storage devices and can dedicate the PCIe slot to a NIC.