Bought my Asrock Rack EPYCD8-2T two years ago, and initially used it with 7351, last year I've bought 7302 and it's been sitting there for half a year, unopened and untested lol. Meanwhile I've upgraded to 3200 lrdimm and it was running fine for half a year on naples, at 2666 of course.
The big day came yesterday when I decided to upgrade everything I can there. Adding two SFP NICs, redoing cable management for better airflow, and installing 7302.
As you may know if you've been a user of this board for years, it may have initially come with 16mb BIOS flash chip, but in order to boot ROME asrock rack updated their BIOS and new image is taking 32 mb, so, in my case, I requested help and they've mailed me two pre-flashed chips(one extra just in case).
Swapped the BIOS chip, it's sitting in a neatly designed 8 pin socket with doors, you just pop it open and lift the old chip out.
Initially board would not start but then I remembered that BIOS doesn't store it's settings within it's own program chip but has other nvram chip(CMOS) which still holds older layout which is likely incompatible with new BIOS program, so, lift the battery, short the 'clear cmos' pad, put battery back, power up and it works.
The problem you may encounter coming from older BIOS is that your fan speed controls are GONE from BIOS hw monitor page. They're nowhere to be found.
There are two options. My support contact provided me with BIOS 2.70 image(I can share it if anyone needs but better and safer to request that from your support rep I guess), but I've already found solutions on this forum which are controlling fan speeds live through ipmitool raw 0x3a 0x01 command, see here: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/asrock-rack-bmc-fan-control.26941/post-249035 and here: https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...k-ep2c602-4l-d16-megarac-sp.24165/post-224904
These literally saved me because suddenly my PWM fans were running on lowest speed with not enough airflow, I would have had to go back and put my old bios in and cpu back, which would be very inconvinient.
All in all, in my particular experience this board runs for 2 years with a few reboots and no major issues so far. Let's see how it's new rome lifecycle would go.
I used to enjoy maintenance and upgrades when it was all for fun and laughs, but now I do it slowly step by step to make sure everything works and I can put another brick in the wall, before stepping over the point of no return after which debugging what part exactly caused the problem becomes a huge PITA.
The big day came yesterday when I decided to upgrade everything I can there. Adding two SFP NICs, redoing cable management for better airflow, and installing 7302.
As you may know if you've been a user of this board for years, it may have initially come with 16mb BIOS flash chip, but in order to boot ROME asrock rack updated their BIOS and new image is taking 32 mb, so, in my case, I requested help and they've mailed me two pre-flashed chips(one extra just in case).
Swapped the BIOS chip, it's sitting in a neatly designed 8 pin socket with doors, you just pop it open and lift the old chip out.
Initially board would not start but then I remembered that BIOS doesn't store it's settings within it's own program chip but has other nvram chip(CMOS) which still holds older layout which is likely incompatible with new BIOS program, so, lift the battery, short the 'clear cmos' pad, put battery back, power up and it works.
The problem you may encounter coming from older BIOS is that your fan speed controls are GONE from BIOS hw monitor page. They're nowhere to be found.
There are two options. My support contact provided me with BIOS 2.70 image(I can share it if anyone needs but better and safer to request that from your support rep I guess), but I've already found solutions on this forum which are controlling fan speeds live through ipmitool raw 0x3a 0x01 command, see here: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/asrock-rack-bmc-fan-control.26941/post-249035 and here: https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...k-ep2c602-4l-d16-megarac-sp.24165/post-224904
These literally saved me because suddenly my PWM fans were running on lowest speed with not enough airflow, I would have had to go back and put my old bios in and cpu back, which would be very inconvinient.
All in all, in my particular experience this board runs for 2 years with a few reboots and no major issues so far. Let's see how it's new rome lifecycle would go.
I used to enjoy maintenance and upgrades when it was all for fun and laughs, but now I do it slowly step by step to make sure everything works and I can put another brick in the wall, before stepping over the point of no return after which debugging what part exactly caused the problem becomes a huge PITA.
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