ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T Review an ATX AMD EPYC Platform

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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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I like the comment about cabled expansion, totally agree it’s the way of future for most devices. Would love to see it come sooner rather than later.
Dealing with risers that have ports just to cable front NVMe disks in some vendors server is just silly :-/
 

zir_blazer

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Dec 5, 2016
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As much as I love the Motherboard, I'm not convinced on doing 7 16x PCIe Slots on ATX because for anything that involves GPUs, you usually have Dual Slot cooling solutions, and that means that only 4 slots are actually usable, as the coolers doesn't allow you height to actually plug something onto the middle slots. The only two slots freely usable with a Dual Slot Video Card is PCIE1, since PCIE2 below it can also be rerouted to a 4x PCIe M.2 Slot, 4 SATA, and two 4x OCuLink Ports, leaving the slot effectively unused, and PCIE7, if you have a bigger than ATX case. For the others, you're either using only Single Slot cards, or risers or something to space the cards in a non-ATX way.
So, how do people tackle onto that problem (Populating all 7 slots) when using Motherboards like this one? Unless you're not doing more than two Video Cards, obviously.
 
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Evan

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7 x T4’s
I already do a lot of 5 x T4’s in a 2U server
yes I know that doesn’t need x16 gen4 PCIe but the next generation.
 
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nago

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Feb 20, 2019
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I'm working on it now!
If you review the AM4 X570 platform please have a look at ECC support. For the X470D4U users had issues to verify that ECC is actually working and found that error reporting is broken (Level1 ECC test results) and after contacting ASRock Rack about it it was stated that error reporting is not supportet by AM4 platform (Level1 ASRock Rack & AMD response). For me ECC support does not only include error correction but also error reporting, i need to see if my modules are having troubles.

Interestingly ASRock Rack recently added a "Conditionally support ECC error reporting function" remark on X470D4U and X570D4I product pages, which is not present on the X570D4U product page. What exactly does this remark mean? Why is it present for X570D4I but not X570D4U?

This added to the "ECC works, but not validated" statement from AMD for Ryzen CPUs results in alot of uncertainty if ECC works on AM4 like one would expect it from Xeon or Epyc platforms.

It would be very nice if you could shine some light on this.
 

WillTaillac

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Feb 28, 2020
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On the X470D4U, ECC support was enabled and visible within the OS (Windows and Linux, I checked). I was made aware of the issue where ECC errors would not be recorded in the BMC after the reviews were published, but could never find any more information than was already available.

For the X570 board, I will of course check ECC support as I did on the X470 board. Unfortunately I don't know of a method to manually invoke ECC errors that I may use to verify the reporting function, and my Googling has not been fruitful in that direction. If someone knows how to test this part, I would be happy to take suggestions and simply PM me.
 
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nickf1227

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Will, can you also look into the PCI-E Layout for the M.2 Drives? I know for the X470D4U the actual lane assignments and speeds were a little weird, with one being PCIE2 x4 and one being PCIE3 x2.
I'm interested to see how the Gen4 link to the chipset gave them wiggle room.

From the spec Sheet:

They say both M.2 are both X4 4.0 lanes, but they are over-committed. So I am a bit confused.
Ryzen has 20 PCIE lanes plus 4 for the chipset, for a total of 24.

If you add up the x16 slot(which switches to x8 when the x8 slot is populated), the x8 slot, the 4x M.2 (CPU) slot, and the PCIE 1X slot, you get 21.
So, I'm assuming the 1X slot goes to the chipset.

Now, we have the 4 lanes going to the chipset. Then we have one of the m.2 slots, which is a 4 lane device (and well assume you are using a Gen 3 SSD), the 10Gig lan, and the 1X slot eating up the rest of the Gen-4 bandwidth gains. They really should NOT have advertised that M.2 as a PCIe Gen 4 capable slot, because there is not enough bandwidth to support that.

There might just barely be enough bandwidth to support all of those things on the chipset with a Gen 3 SSD, but if you can find a way to comparativley test the two boards I would find that fascinating.

Additionally, I am very saddened that they have one m.2 22110 and one 2280....that means only 1 enterpise-class m.2 stick this time.
 
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WillTaillac

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Feb 28, 2020
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Ah, that's a different board. I've got the X570D4I-2T, which is mITX and only has a single M.2. The board you're looking at, not sure it is actually released yet.

As for the chipset-driven M.2 slot on the board you're looking at, much like all the desktop Ryzen X570 boards, there exists a possibility of bandwidth contention on the chipset PCIe 4x link because the M.2 slot attached to the chipset can consume the entire bandwidth. Of course, on consumer boards this contention is far less serious because you don't have dual 10 GbE NICs potentially chewing up 20 Gb/s of your 64 Gb/s link. I would imagine there is an overcommitment on the X70D4U-2L2T, but there should still be enough bandwidth left over for "better than PCIe 3.0 speeds", and as long as your NICs aren't operating at full tilt lots of use case scenarios likely wouldn't notice the overcommitment.
 
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Deslok

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As much as I love the Motherboard, I'm not convinced on doing 7 16x PCIe Slots on ATX because for anything that involves GPUs, you usually have Dual Slot cooling solutions, and that means that only 4 slots are actually usable, as the coolers doesn't allow you height to actually plug something onto the middle slots. The only two slots freely usable with a Dual Slot Video Card is PCIE1, since PCIE2 below it can also be rerouted to a 4x PCIe M.2 Slot, 4 SATA, and two 4x OCuLink Ports, leaving the slot effectively unused, and PCIE7, if you have a bigger than ATX case. For the others, you're either using only Single Slot cards, or risers or something to space the cards in a non-ATX way.
So, how do people tackle onto that problem (Populating all 7 slots) when using Motherboards like this one? Unless you're not doing more than two Video Cards, obviously.
I know in my desktop(a t7500) I'm using a single slot GPU(quadro P4000) leaving slots for things I wouldn't need on this board(like the m.2 riser card or my SAS controller) alongside things like my 40Gb network adapter and a dedicated soundcard and usb 3.0 controller both of which i'd probably want on this board to supplement what's available(or missing in the case of sound) on this board.
 
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nickf1227

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I know in my desktop(a t7500) I'm using a single slot GPU(quadro P4000) leaving slots for things I wouldn't need on this board(like the m.2 riser card or my SAS controller) alongside things like my 40Gb network adapter and a dedicated soundcard and usb 3.0 controller both of which i'd probably want on this board to supplement what's available(or missing in the case of sound) on this board.
I would imagine, for the target audience of this platform, that single slot GPUs could very much be a viable option. The P4000, RTX4000, are just a couple that come to mind. You could virtualize a CAD lab with a couple of these bad boys and put thin clients on the desks to save space and heat load.
 

zir_blazer

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Dec 5, 2016
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I know in my desktop(a t7500) I'm using a single slot GPU(quadro P4000) leaving slots for things I wouldn't need on this board(like the m.2 riser card or my SAS controller) alongside things like my 40Gb network adapter and a dedicated soundcard and usb 3.0 controller both of which i'd probably want on this board to supplement what's available(or missing in the case of sound) on this board.
Sound Cards and most USB Cards doesn't need a full fledged 16x PCIe 4.0 slot, they would do roughly the same on 1x PCIe 3.0, so I wouldn't even count them. And usually you can get by with USB Sound Cards or USB Hubs.
Multiple SAS Controllers or NICs with multiple Ports, or a multitude of PCIe-to-M.2/U.2/OCuLink card adapters seems to be what makes the most sense from a slots+lanes perspective in standard ATX, so I suppose than that answer my question.
 

Deslok

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Sound Cards and most USB Cards doesn't need a full fledged 16x PCIe 4.0 slot, they would do roughly the same on 1x PCIe 3.0, so I wouldn't even count them. And usually you can get by with USB Sound Cards or USB Hubs.
Multiple SAS Controllers or NICs with multiple Ports, or a multitude of PCIe-to-M.2/U.2/OCuLink card adapters seems to be what makes the most sense from a slots+lanes perspective in standard ATX, so I suppose than that answer my question.
I'll give you the soundcard even my ESI maya44 is a 1x device, but the usb side? i've seen plenty of 4x usb cards that leverage multiple controllers to improve their performance, here's a modern usb-c one from sonnet Allegro USB-C 4-Port PCIe (4-port, SuperSpeed USB-C 10Gbps [USB 3.2 Gen 2] PCIe Card with Dual Controllers and USB-C Charging) and an(admittedly older) quad controller one from startech PCI Express USB 3.0 Card - 4 Dedicated Channels - 4-Port | USB 3.0 Cards | StarTech.com I'm sure we'll see more like these as 4x/8x devices when we get usb 4(or whatever 3.x they name it again) with 20gbps/port capabilities.

All that said, there's lots of variety in things you can hook to PCIe for all sorts of stuff, video capture cards would likely be another popular choice(I'd have one if I wasn't out of pcie myself)
 

whbeers

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Jul 11, 2020
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Noticed the product page was updated to indicate Milan support:

*Supports AMD EPYC™ 7003* and 7002 Series Processors

*A BIOS update is required to support AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series Processors. Please contact ASRock Rack Technical Support for the necessary firmwares.
 

superempie

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Sep 25, 2015
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Don't know if it has been mentioned here somewhere, but reached out to ASRockRack for missing fan settings in the BMC on the ROMED8-2T and got BMC firmware version P1.10.01. Now I have fan settings. BMC firmware is not listed on the download page of the motherboard (P1.10.00 is latest mentioned). Haven't played with it yet, but got a document with it explaining how it works.
So if you need it, contact ASRockRack through their support form.
 

Mace

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Feb 3, 2021
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New Bios & BMC Firmware available to download: ASRock Rack > ROMED8-2T
Bios 3.20 => Support EPYC7002 and EPYC7003 series CPUs (EPYC7001 is not supported)
BMC 01.19.00 => Init some PWM registers.

Not installed myself yet, ´because it ain´t broke, I´m not needing to fix it....