And so it begins... First AMD Ryzen AM4 server motherboard.

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TomUK

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Aug 30, 2017
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Couple of users on Reddit saying this will be available in the UK/Europe by end of March or early April

Fingers crossed its priced well.

Some more info in this thread: ASRock Rack has created the first AM4 socket server board

Some more information from Michelle Wu.

I checked with our team, we actually have few(about 2~5pcs) PVT (Production Verification Test) stage sample on hand, which is the same as mass production version board. But no discount on those boards.
Let me know if you would like to purchase them, we can reserve the board for you.



Yes, the board will support third generation of Ryzen processors after BIOS update.

We will release new BIOS that support third generation of Ryzen processors when the processor is released by AMD.
And:

I spoke with Michelle Wu with ASRockRack US Sales.

The mass production date of our X470D4U board is Mid-March, and the board will be delivered and officially available in the US on about the week of March 26.

Unit price is $210 (via US local distributors, Ma Labs or ASI, depends on which you prefer to work with)

Looks like someone has their hands on one:

Altkey
1d
  • Right now my only complaint is I can’t get the VGA out to work, but the IPMI’s KVM basically fills that role. Plus I’m using an old VGA monitor with a cable I’m not 100% sure if works so take that with a grain of salt.
  • The BIOS/UEFI looks like a standard no-frills UEFI, a better way to view all it’s options is to view the manuals available on their website.
  • I haven’t messed around with features like Image Redirection and Remote Media, but the interface for those seems to be pretty simple.
  • The built-in Dr. Debug hex display was useful when it hung entering into the UEFI Setup the first time, just did a reset and everything worked.
  • I haven’t timed it, but disabling CMS/Legacy boot sped up boot times quite a bit.
  • FreeNAS works, but I didn’t have doubts about that.
  • I have 6 of the 8 SATA ports used, works well. Intel Optane NVMe boot drive works as well.
Not really sure what else, feel free to ask me questions and I’ll my best to answer.


All sounds pretty positive
 
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w0mbl3

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Just found out about this board in my habitual few-monthly google for "ryzen ipmi". Seems like we're finally getting close.

This is almost "shut up and take my money".. my only concern is memory. Reading the manual, it appears for running 4 DIMM's, you need single-rank to hit 2133MHz, which means max is 64GB total capacity. Alternative is go with 32GB DIMM's but it slows to 1866MHz ram speed, which hurts on a memory-speed-hungry architecture.

I see newegg listing ("sold out" probably means " no stock yet"), for $249.

Might be time to sell my dually E5-2680V2 to fund one of these with a Ryzen 2700X and 4x 32GB DIMM's.
 

TomUK

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Aug 30, 2017
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Just found out about this board in my habitual few-monthly google for "ryzen ipmi". Seems like we're finally getting close.

This is almost "shut up and take my money".. my only concern is memory. Reading the manual, it appears for running 4 DIMM's, you need single-rank to hit 2133MHz, which means max is 64GB total capacity. Alternative is go with 32GB DIMM's but it slows to 1866MHz ram speed, which hurts on a memory-speed-hungry architecture.

I see newegg listing ("sold out" probably means " no stock yet"), for $249.

Might be time to sell my dually E5-2680V2 to fund one of these with a Ryzen 2700X and 4x 32GB DIMM's.
I'm not sure your reading the spec correctly - the largest single supported module is 16GB udimm
I guess in the future they may add support for 32GB udimm - but its not referenced on the Asrock specs or site for the moment.

Regarding speeds - these seem to be a worse case scenario type, you will see many Ryzen and TR board specs stating low speeds with all slots populated (single rank or not), but this largely depends on the quality of the IMC in your CPU, for example the manual for my Asus X399A Prime says I should only be able to hit 2400 with all slots populated, but I can get to 2993 completely fine, if I half the number of modules in my TR system I can get the same memory to 3200.
 

w0mbl3

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I'm not sure your reading the spec correctly - the largest single supported module is 16GB udimm
I guess in the future they may add support for 32GB udimm - but its not referenced on the Asrock specs or site for the moment.
Page 2 of the manual says "DIMM Size Per DIMM- ECC/UDIMM: 64GB, 32GB, 16GB, 8GB"

Therefore I'm pretty sure the spec on the web page just means "support for up to 64GB DIMM's" and not "max of 64GB for the board", but agree its a little opaque, so first movers will have to eat that risk that it may not support 128 or 256GB RAM (I'd like 128 for VM's).

Speed-wise - I have some 2133MHz 16GB unbuffered-ECC DIMMs which run at 2600MHz in with my Ryzen 1700, but its dependent on overclocking options in the BIOS which a server-oriented board may not support.
 

Mam89

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I'll wait until someone else is brave enough to test with >16GB dimms, if it can fit 4 32GB then it's a no brainer for my homelab.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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There are reports of ryzen's working with regular non-ECC 32GB DIMMs even though it's not officially supported, so it might just be another case of $oem sticking to manufacturer-reported limits. Whether it'll work with ECC or not remains to be seen.

I'm hoping the memory speeds are a "worst case" and that it'll actually be faster in the real world.

Of course, ASRockRack should know that the fastest way to sell a bucketload of these would be to get it working nicely and then ship a review unit to Patrick who would of course test with any and all UDIMMs at his disposal... a server-lite board than can take a £200 8-core CPU (or indeed whatever comes when Zen 2 appears) would certainly get snapped up by me (assuming we still have electricity post-Brexit of course).
 
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herby

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Amazon has it listed for sale already (available w/ prime shipping) arriving in May: ASROCK RACK X470D4U

I'm super excited for this board, but not quite enough to put money down before reviews.
 

Mam89

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This would hit where the Epyc 3000 leaves us in a rut: form factor with available expansion.

This thing would be the swiss army knife of homelab/smb as long as it's memory is on par with Epyc 3000.

Heres another vote for some STH review love!
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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This would hit where the Epyc 3000 leaves us in a rut: form factor with available expansion.
The current crop of Epyc 3000 boards at least; the SoC themselves have more PCIe lanes and a better memory controller (ECC + non-ECC, UDIMM and RDIMM) but will like be substantially more expensive than a Ryzen/ASRockRack combo.

Here's hoping that SM and ASR are also planning on bringing out a range of Epyc 3000 boards that better leverage the platform features - as sexy as the M11SDV series are, they leave a lot of things on the table due to their mITX form factor.
 

fridgespacer

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Feb 27, 2019
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I received my X470D4U earlier this week from Newegg. The original idea was to use my existing desktop memory on this board, but that didn't work out when the BIOS detected 64MB per DIMM.

I received 2x KSM26ED8/16ME today, enabled ECC in the BIOS, booted into Linux, and dmidecode is showing ECC as functional with this 2600X CPU.

upload_2019-4-11_13-51-33.png

ECC is enabled in the BIOS via:
Advanced -> AMD CBS -> UMC Common Options -> DDR4 Common Options -> Common RAS -> DRAM ECC Enable

If anyone would like to loan me 4x 32GB ECC DIMMs I'd be glad to test to see if the system will use 128GB. I too would love to use this board in a server, but 64GB isn't gonna cut it for my use case.
 
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zir_blazer

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This would hit where the Epyc 3000 leaves us in a rut: form factor with available expansion.

This thing would be the swiss army knife of homelab/smb as long as it's memory is on par with Epyc 3000.

Heres another vote for some STH review love!
I agree with those definitions. Actually, THIS would be the type of product that would be better served by an Embedded EPYC than a socketed AM4 Ryzen.

Is THAT hard to achieve perfection?

Bleh, I just remembered that Embedded Ryzen supports only 1 DPC instead of 2 like its Desktop counterparts, so at most you would be able to use two slots, not four. Not sure if single die Embedded EPYC also has that limitation.


I received my X470D4U earlier this week from Newegg. The original idea was to use my existing desktop memory on this board, but that didn't work out when the BIOS detected 64MB per DIMM.
Can you add more info about that? I find it weird that the computer POSTed but misdetected the RAM size.
 

Patrick

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Maybe start a thread @fridgespacer on the board itself?

@e97 it is really hard to buy a motherboard and put an EPYC in it right now if you want a server (as opposed to a workstation.) Prices are too good on the complete systems.
 
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e97

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@Patrick interesting! are there vendors selling high density compute (aka water cooled) EPYC? with matching compute GPUs?

We're planning on using the above EPYCD8 (gb version) + 40Gb IB + 6 GPUs.

As far as I know, no one else comes close in efficiency + density, but if you're talking about ready to deploy tomorrow, they might win ;)
 
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Patrick

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@e97 Cray is :)

I was referring more to like the HPE DL325's we have been buying. Not GPU platforms, but decent nodes themselves. For a fairly vanilla UP server, the DL325's are awesome.
 

w0mbl3

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I've ordered one.. now the wait begins for Aussie distributor stock to come through.

I'll probably put a Ryzen 3700(X) in it.. 12 cores with a 4GHz+ clock is great, and my dual E5-2680v2 will get sold off in pieces, as the ryzen will use less than half the idle power, and have better single-thread performance.

12C/24T is plenty for my homelab virtualisation spread - will be able to have a grunty enough VM for compiles, without sacrificing the other VM's I need to run, and dual M.2 slots for a couple of MP300 960GB drives will do local VM storage very nicely.
 

e97

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The egg has the motherboard for $250 (sold out at the moment) and MSRP is supposedly around $200 which makes sense.

It needs moar PCI-e lanes!

Ryzen 3000 will be supported via BIOS update on this motherboard jumps to PCI-e 4.0. Wonder if the same BIOS update will boost the slots to PCI-e to 4.0 or if that requires X570..


I've ordered one.. now the wait begins for Aussie distributor stock to come through.

I'll probably put a Ryzen 3700(X) in it.. 12 cores with a 4GHz+ clock is great, and my dual E5-2680v2 will get sold off in pieces, as the ryzen will use less than half the idle power, and have better single-thread performance.

12C/24T is plenty for my homelab virtualisation spread - will be able to have a grunty enough VM for compiles, without sacrificing the other VM's I need to run, and dual M.2 slots for a couple of MP300 960GB drives will do local VM storage very nicely.
Thinking of something similar to replace a workstation but I'll miss having the cheap 256GB of RAM the dual LGA2011 platform allows. This fills up easily at 64GB and maybe 128GB if you can find the right 32GB modules ($$$$)?