2x 25GbE + AM5 - Asrock Rack B650D4U3-2Q/BCM - The board I never realized I needed

[bryan_v]

Stumbled upon this beauty on the the Asrock Rack website. No other trace on the interwebs, except the BIOS is was released on June 21, 2024...

No one, not Gigabyte, not even Supermicro seems to have anything like it. Now if only that x4 was an x16 supporting x8/x8 and x4x4/x4x4 we'd have a real party on our hands; although I'd still probably take one of these over a Threadripper.

@Patrick any chance you can get a sample into the office and find out when the board will be GA?

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=B650D4U3-2Q/BCM

B650D4U3-2Q/BCM

• Micro-ATX (9.6" x 9.6")
• Supports AMD EPYC™ 4004 and AMD Ryzen™ 8000/7000 Series Processors
• 4 DIMM slots (2DPC), supports DDR5 ECC/non-ECC UDIMM
• 1 PCIe5.0 x16
• 1 PCIe4.0 x4, 1 PCIe4.0 x1
• Supports 1 M.2 (PCIe5.0 x4)
• 4 SATA 6Gb/s
• 2 SFP28 (25GbE) by Broadcom BCM57502
• 1 HDMI
• Remote management (IPMI)

 

[RolloZ170]

ASRock Rack: worse BIOS support like usual.

 

[twin_savage]

MSI makes an AM5 board with built-in 25GbE aswell, and I think the MSI board uses a much better chipset to do it; it has different but not necessarily better PCIe lane layout and much better VRM than the Asrock Rack board.

 

[Patrick]

@Patrick any chance you can get a sample into the office and find out when the board will be GA?

I can ask. Unlikely to be this month. The rest of Q3 and early Q4 are absolutely packed.

 

[NablaSquaredG]

No one, not Gigabyte, not even Supermicro seems to have anything like it.

Little brother of the B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM

MSI has the D3052

none of them are available, sadly. I’m planning to build some 1U firewalls with Ryzen 9950X

 

[bryan_v]

@twin_savage I actually just looked at the MSI board (D3052) it's also B650, but the slot design is both better and worse than the Asrock.

The MSI D3052 has the x4 slot right below the x16 so you can't use a 2-slot GPU with it without blocking the x4 slot, however, the x4 slot is Gen5 while the M.2 is Gen4 which means it could easily drive a 100GbE NIC if someone made an x4 Gen5 QSFP28 NIC; or at a minimum squeeze in another Gen5 SSD.

 

[twin_savage]

@bryan_v I mean the network chipset is better (imo) on the MSI board than the Asrock board. Intel has historically had better driver and feature support than Broadcom.

The PCIe slot configuration is definitely unique on both boards. I would have preferred it if they were laid out like the Supermicro H13SAE-MF's slots more.

 

[bryan_v]

Oh yea, the D3052's Intel E810 is awesome; 256 virtual functions, ROCEv2, and an onboard packet pipeline for VxLAN and GRE.
I don't even know why AsRock uses BCM high-speed nics... oh yea to save $120 CAD off list price.

And yea, the H13SAE-MF layout is the best. AsRock had the same layout with the X470 and X570 boards, I don't know why they gave up on the MUX and running the longer traces. I always run my GPUs on x8 and getting that second pair of x8 lanes back is the main reason I can't be bothered with EPYC or Threadripper.

 

[helskor]

Gear Seekers on YouTube did a review of the MSI motherboard:

Though it seems it will be very difficult to get.

 

[NablaSquaredG]

I have got the info from ASrock that they should have stock for B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM around begin of October in Europe.

 

[madsci1016]

@bryan_v I mean the network chipset is better (imo) on the MSI board than the Asrock board. Intel has historically had better driver and feature support than Broadcom.

The PCIe slot configuration is definitely unique on both boards. I would have preferred it if they were laid out like the Supermicro H13SAE-MF's slots more.

Found this thread while drooling over AM5 server boards.

I might be interested to try the MSI, but the SFP28 cages are tied to the chipset. on the Asrockrack they are tied to the CPU.

If network traffic is hitting data on the SATA drives, are we worried about all of it going through the PCIe 4.0 x4 link between chipset and cpu, twice?

 

[zer0sum]

I want to like these boards, but the lack of PCIe lanes is such a tragedy

As soon as you get an EPYC board, you are so spoiled and everything else is painful to consider

 

[bryan_v]

AM4/AM5 boards are different beasts. They address both low power/performance use cases as well as high freq + low thread use cases; both which happen more often in a homelab/devlab scenario.

I've used Epyc for work, and loved it, but at a certain point you realize that unless you're saturating more than x16 lanes simultaneously on a continuous basis, you really don't need that many PCIe lanes other than to flex to randos. My P4510 NAS, my 3080 Ti gaming pc, and my dev box are all hyperconverged on a single AM4 board with Intel X540 VFs and it's amazing. Would I love an extra x8 or x16 lanes? Sure! Is it worth an extra 100W+ TDP, lower clocks, and an extra $500, nope. I would just drop $350 on a PCIe switch card and call it a day.

@madsci1016 SATA is such a slow interface that it wouldn't matter. Technically there is a latency and IRQ penalty for traversing the chipset, but anything that involves network I/O you're 3-4 orders of magnitude off (ms vs. μs), even with RDMA, and unless you've got a 45 drive chassis, your IRQ can handle it fine. Hanging network I/O off the chipset makes alot of sense in an AM5 scenario because it leave the CPU lanes free to do latency sensitive I/O that you would find on a high-clock box, like GPU DMA (even Optane access in the 20 μs range and would be barely noticable.)

 

[xyvyx]

Still haven't found this one for sale (other than some site in Sweden which requires a min order of 200 units).
But just in case somebody wants to read the manual, for which I couldn't find a link on the Asrock product page:
https://download.asrock.com/Manual/B650D4U3-2QBCM.pdf

I'm hoping to replace my gaming PC w/ a new AM5 9800X3D based system, but I need 3 usable PCIe slots and am finding limited options. Basically, nothing w/ the X870E chipset so far has enough s lots. With X670E, the Asus Crossfire seems to be the only option that gives me 1 pcie x16 slot for my 4090 GPU, then enough space to plug in my Mellanox CX4-LW adapter in the other x16 slot (forcing them into x8/x8 operation), then 1 more pcie x1 slot for my RME soundcard.

This Asrock board looked like a good alternative w/ the onboard SFP28 ports. It's pretty low on USB ports, but at least has USB 3.2 & USB 2.0 headers on-board.

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Still haven't found this one for sale (other than some site in Sweden which requires a min order of 200 units).

I think it's more of a niche model. You should have better success with the B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM

 

[Ralph_IT]

Right now B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM carries a hefty price for what it offers.

[...]
I'm hoping to replace my gaming PC w/ a new AM5 9800X3D based system, but I need 3 usable PCIe slots and am finding limited options. Basically, nothing w/ the X870E chipset so far has enough s lots. With X670E, the Asus Crossfire seems to be the only option that gives me 1 pcie x16 slot for my 4090 GPU, then enough space to plug in my Mellanox CX4-LW adapter in the other x16 slot (forcing them into x8/x8 operation), then 1 more pcie x1 slot for my RME soundcard.

Asus x870E-Creator Wifi has dual Pcie 5.0 (x8/x8) and one Pcie 4.0 x4.

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Right now B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM carries a hefty price for what it offers.

As always with ASRock Boards. Look what the X570D4U-2L2T did cost...

 

[xyvyx]

Right now B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM carries a hefty price for what it offers.


Asus x870E-Creator Wifi has dual Pcie 5.0 (x8/x8) and one Pcie 4.0 x4.

Yeah, that board is definitely on my radar. Design-wise, I think it looks better than most too.
But from what I can tell, the space between the two x16 slots might not be big enough to fit a 3.65-slot wide Asus RTX 4090 TUF edition card.
A standard pcie slot space is 20.32mm and this 4090 card is 72.6mm, but I can't find the space between the slots on that Creator board.

Luckily, I have a Microcenter nearby, so I might be able to measure/test it!

 

[CompMeistR]

Yep, Newegg pricing looks to be a bit steep:

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813140155?Item=N82E16813140155&SoldByNewegg=1

 

[MountainBofh]

Shame its a broadcom controller for the ethernet. Mellanox or Intel would of been so much better....