Along with the Intel Xeon E-2100 series launch today, we have the ASRock Rack C246M WS launch. This single socket LGA 1151 motherboard supports the new Coffee Lake Xeon E series CPUs in a mATX form factor.
ASRock Rack C246M WS Motherboard for Intel Xeon E-2100 Workstations
In a familiar and compact mATX form factor, ASRock Rack fits a lot of functionality. This includes a full four DDR4-2666 DIMM slots (more on this below in the press release.) One also gets many of the ARock Rack C246M WS C246 platform features such as 8x 7-pin SATA III 6.0gbps ports.
PCIe slots are listed as PCIe 3.0 x16, x8 and x4 and there is an m.2 slot for today’s trendiest storage option.
The rear I/O has legacy Serial and VGA ports. It also has HDMI, Display Port, 4x USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports and dual Intel LAN (Intel i210 and i219LM based.)
Since this is a workstation motherboard, the ASRock Rack C246M WS does not have an IPMI BMC and there are workstation features such as audio including S/PDIF optical output.
Interesting Press Release Excerpt
One of the more interesting points of the release was this excerpt:
Powered by the new Intel Xeon processors E family for workstation resulting in up to 50% performance improvement on multi-threaded workloads and premium 4K video content creations, the C246M WS features up to 256GB maximum memory configuration in four DDR4 2666MHz ECC/non-ECC UDIMM slots, eight SATA3 ports (6 Gb/s) via Intel C246 controller while one is shared with an M.2 slot, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports by Intel I210 and I219LM delivering up to 1000 Mbps of network connection bandwidth as well as offering PCI-E x16, x8 and x4 slots for higher-bandwidth and more scalable peripheral devices connections.
(Source: ASRock Rack, emphasis added.)
That points to 256GB UDIMM support. Physically in this platform that would require 64GB per DIMM UDIMMs which are not on the market at this point. The Intel Xeon E-2100 series only supports 4x 16GB for 64GB officially. You can see that in our Intel Xeon E-2100 An Updated Platform and Market Segment piece.
[Edit] We followed-up with ASRock Rack, the correct maximum RAM figure should be 64GB.
