The ASRock EPC612D4I arrived today direct from Taiwan. Here is just a place to keep notes during testing. Feel free to ask questions.
Initial thoughts
This is probably an initial run motherboard but looks nice. There is absolutely no wasted space. One can really see how big the Aspeed AST2400 chip plus RAM is compared to everything else onboard as they certainly take up more space than the 4x SATA connectors. When you compare the power/ functionality of those IC's to what is in the average smartphone today, it is amazing that someone does not take that market.
The internal USB 3.0 header is very nice to have. I did not notice this earlier but I can easily spot 5x 4-pin PWM fan headers. I do wish ASRock picked a different fan header color so they were faster to see. In a dark case that would be an issue.
One key difference between this and other motherboards: there are a total of FOUR cylindrical capacitors on the top of the motherboard. A quick count shows 10 on the Xeon D-1540 platform next to this one in the lab.
The back of the motherboard is more interesting than usual. I can spot what appears to be a Realtek chip, that I would assume is the IPMI NIC and the Nuvotion controller on the back of the motherboard.
Innodisk sent the RAM modules. This motherboard uses DDR4 SODIMMs. The 8GB ECC SODIMMs Innodisk sent I would imagine are not the highest production parts at the moment. Very lucky to have these.
Initial thoughts
This is probably an initial run motherboard but looks nice. There is absolutely no wasted space. One can really see how big the Aspeed AST2400 chip plus RAM is compared to everything else onboard as they certainly take up more space than the 4x SATA connectors. When you compare the power/ functionality of those IC's to what is in the average smartphone today, it is amazing that someone does not take that market.
The internal USB 3.0 header is very nice to have. I did not notice this earlier but I can easily spot 5x 4-pin PWM fan headers. I do wish ASRock picked a different fan header color so they were faster to see. In a dark case that would be an issue.
One key difference between this and other motherboards: there are a total of FOUR cylindrical capacitors on the top of the motherboard. A quick count shows 10 on the Xeon D-1540 platform next to this one in the lab.
The back of the motherboard is more interesting than usual. I can spot what appears to be a Realtek chip, that I would assume is the IPMI NIC and the Nuvotion controller on the back of the motherboard.
Innodisk sent the RAM modules. This motherboard uses DDR4 SODIMMs. The 8GB ECC SODIMMs Innodisk sent I would imagine are not the highest production parts at the moment. Very lucky to have these.
