Asrock Rack W680 Motherboards discussion

[autoturk]

Got my hands on a Asrock Rack W680 board (specifically W680D4U-2L2T/G5 that was reviewed on STH) and thought to start a thread where folks could share their learnings/experiences on these boards. Here's my build so far:

- i7 12700k
- 2 x 16 GB non-ecc DDR5 UDIMMs
- one 10 GB NIC in use + IPMI.

Here's what my idle power usage looks like:
- IPMI only: 6.4 W
- BIOS: 45 W
- Unraid booted (With no drives): 25 W

EDIT: updated the above after changing C-state configs from Auto to Enabled. Idle went from 30 W to 25 W.

Feel free to share any experiences here.

 

[autoturk]

So I wanted to turn off LAN failover for the BMC, and apparently it's a bit more complicated than just turning off a failover setting... Following this reddit post on the x570d4u, I did the following:

1) Settings > Network Settings > Network Bond Configuration > disabled bonding.
2) Settings > Services > I have configured web and kvm to listen on eth0 *only*, instead of "both".

But I'm still getting an IP for the IPMI when there is no ethernet cable connected for the IPMI. I am hesitant to run the ipmitool command in the post above because it's not the same board, so I reached out to Asrock Rack support. Will update with what they say.

EDIT: they suggest running the following (same command as above):

 ipmitool raw 0x32 0x71 0x0 0x01 0x00

 

[autoturk]

Maybe this was obvious to others, but I'm unable to get a video signal through IPMI web interface if I have anything connected to the HDMI port. I guess this kicks in the iGPU, which takes priority over the Aspeed chip.

Thankfully the iGPU is seen by Ubuntu even if nothing is connected to it, and it seems like Quicksync is being used by Jellyfin.

 

[dieter42]

Got my hands on a Asrock Rack W680 board (specifically W680D4U-2L2T/G5 that was reviewed on STH) and thought to start a thread where folks could share their learnings/experiences on these boards. Here's my build so far:

- i7 12700k
- 2 x 16 GB non-ecc DDR5 UDIMMs
- one 10 GB NIC in use + IPMI.

Here's what my idle power usage looks like:
- IPMI only: 6.4 W
- BIOS: 45 W
- Unraid booted (With no drives): 25 W

EDIT: updated the above after changing C-state configs from Auto to Enabled. Idle went from 30 W to 25 W.

Feel free to share any experiences here.

Thanks for sharing the details! I'm interested in this mainboard as well (haven't ordered yet).
I plan to use Ubuntu server and run some kvm based VMs. Hence, I'd like to raise a few questions...
I don't know much about Unraid .. are you running console or GUI mode?
Have you applied additional power saving settings to Unraid?
Assume you booted Unraid via NVMe, could you share the HW type?
Power supply HW would be interesting as well, especially with low load efficiency varies quite a lot.

Thanks a lot!

 

[autoturk]

Thanks for sharing the details! I'm interested in this mainboard as well (haven't ordered yet).
I plan to use Ubuntu server and run some kvm based VMs. Hence, I'd like to raise a few questions...
I don't know much about Unraid .. are you running console or GUI mode?
Have you applied additional power saving settings to Unraid?
Assume you booted Unraid via NVMe, could you share the HW type?
Power supply HW would be interesting as well, especially with low load efficiency varies quite a lot.

Thanks a lot!

of course!

So Unraid runs off of a USB flash disk, so I didn't have any drives connected when I had it booted, and it was a fresh image so I didn't do any tweaking. Running console.

I recently booted Ubuntu just to test out a few things with a small Intel optane 58 gb NVME and a few case fans and I was showing similar power consumption figures.

Power supply was an 850 Watt XFX platinum power supply from an old build, but I've also connected a Gold flex ATX 400 watt power supply and had similar figures as well.

Hope this is helpful!

 

[lwwl]

I recently got this board as well (the W680D4U version) to upgrade my old system (i7-7700). Initially I was looking at the AM5 equivalent (B650D4U), but settled for the intel version, since it appeared to have lower idle consumption.

I use it as a (relatively) low powered SFF headless workstation at home. I paired it with a i5-13600T (35W) CPU and 2x 32GB Kingston DDR5 ECC in a desktop case with 300w TFX PSU and space for low-profile PCI-e cards. It also has an Nvidia T600 (4GB) for some very light CUDA computations. It currently idles at around 40 degrees Celsius.

Overall, it seems to be working well and I am very happy so far but I haven't been able to stress test it yet.

 

[labxplore]

I use it as a (relatively) low powered SFF headless workstation at home. I paired it with a i5-13600T (35W) CPU and 2x 32GB Kingston DDR5 ECC in a desktop case with 300w TFX PSU and space for low-profile PCI-e cards. It also has an Nvidia T600 (4GB) for some very light CUDA computations. It currently idles at around 40 degrees Celsius.

Have you been able to measure your idle consumption (in W) to compare with OP's numbers? (OP has 10GB NIC and you have a GPU so "maybe" they have similar idle consumption profile )

 

[lwwl]

Have you been able to measure your idle consumption (in W) to compare with OP's numbers? (OP has 10GB NIC and you have a GPU so "maybe" they have similar idle consumption profile )

Unfortunately, I do not have any equipment to do that. I have feeling it is more powerefficient than my previous workstation (7gen i7) with a similar setup but no way to put any numbers on it. My noctua fans are remarkably quiet for a 24/7 operation with sometimes decent load.

 

[MartinJ]

Thought I'd post this here if anyone with the same issue stumbles across this thread.

I have an ASRock Rack W680D4U-2L2T/G5, Intel Core i5-12600K, 2x Micron 32 GB DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM, Google Coral TPU M.2 B+M Key, Intel X710-DA2, LSI SAS 9211-4i, 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 8 TB, Seagate SkyHawk AI 8 TB, 2x Micron 7450 MAX 800 GB.

For the two Micron 7450 MAX, I initially bought OCuLink to U.3 cables from Micro SATA Cables (PCIe Gen 4 16 GT/s OCulink (SFF-8611) to U.3 (SFF-8639) Cable). These didn't work and back then, last year in September, there were no reports on working cables. Both ASRock Rack and Micro SATA Cables support didn't have any suggestions. I researched again in January this year and there are a few Reddit and forum posts that suggest that Supermicro CBL-SAST-0956 OCuLink to U.2 cables (Supermicro 55cm OCuLink to U.2 PCIE with Power Cable (CBL-SAST-0956)) are the only ones working with a variety of ASRock Rack motherboards. I bought them and I can confirm that they work with my motherboard and the Micron 7450 MAX.

 

[divStar]

I hope I don't necro this thread too much, but I recently bought the same motherboard, too - W680D4U-2L2T/G5.
I used the same OCuLink -> U.2 cables mentioned by @MartinJ successfully on all 4 ports with 4 Samsung P983 3.84TB drives. I also added a m.2 SSD (Micron 7400 MAX 800GB) and a couple of WD Ultrastar SA620 480GB and 960GB SSDs.

I used 4x KSM48E40BD8KI-32HA 32GB UDIMM ECC DDR5 RAM from Kingston and a i5-12500 CPU. The SuperMicro SC731-i404B chassis came with a 400W 80+Gold PSU and it probably would have sufficed, but since I encountered random restarts and RAM issues (ECC correctable errors in the IPMI Event Log) when populating DDR5_A1 and DDR5_B1, I had to return the board to the seller and am currently waiting.

In general though it's a great board. Sure, in my configuration the power consumption was around 50-60W in idle and about 115W when stress-testing CPU and/or RAM, but it's okay for me.

Everyone getting this board should check for any leds on the motherboard emitting red light (I had that on the CPU_PLUG1 and DIMM_PLUG1 and yet CPU stress test wasn't a problem and Memtest86 worked, too, without errors as long as I only used 2 memory banks (A2 and B2)). I also had an issue with the fan speed display, because while the Noctua NH-U12S (PWM) fan was working and didn't spin anywhere near max speed, the IPMI reported 2200RPM. It also reported the same RPM for the PWM chassis fan, that came pre-installed in the SuperMicro SC731-i404B case.

Also ASRockRack BIOS / Firmware page is a mess. It includes BIOS 20.03 and 21.04 BETA, but on their RackTSD FTP there is version 21.08 even and a new BMC version (4.01.00). You do not have to update - in fact ASR discourages upgrading unless you experience issues.

Long story short: if I receive a fully functional motherboard, this board is nice. All the NICs etc. are really nice to have for e.g. OPNsense and sending LAN stuff to other rooms and so on.

Also OCuLink does not transport electricity, so you need to transport it otherwise.