ASRock Rack EPYC4000D4U AMD EPYC 4005 Motherboard Review

The time has come to get to our ASRock Rack EPYC4000D4U motherboard review. This is a motherboard designed to bring server-class features to AMD’s socket AM5 CPUs. It is also just a neat motherboard that we have featured previously, so it seemed like it was time to show this one off.

If this motherboard sounds familiar, we used it in our AMD EPYC 4005 Grado is Great launch piece and accompanying video:

As always, we suggest watching this in its own tab, browser, or app for the best viewing experience.

ASRock Rack EPYC4000D4U Overview

First off, the ASRock Rack EPYC4000D4U motherboard comes in a conventional mATX form factor. The benefit of this size is that it fits in so many existing rackmount and tower cases that it is extremely versatile.

The other nice thing about this form factor is that there is enough space to have to make design choices, but not straight trade-offs due to the space. We have seen other EPYC 4000 series platforms have to cut functionality for form factors, but this is one where that seems to not have happend. It also has a few neat features with the EPYC 4000 series.

Here we have it with the AMD EPYC 4565P 16-core part at 170W. Of note, the doscumentation says that for 170W it needs liquid cooling but it supports the higher power CPUs. That is not true of all platforms for these CPUs. We should also mention that we really focused on the EPYC 4004 and EPYC 4005 series, using this also with an AMD EPYC 4464P as a reference platform for a few of our recent reviews.

You can also use this with Ryzen CPUs, but we are going to let you go into more detail on that. At a high-level, if you are building a server, we recommend EPYC in this motherboard. If you want the maximum overclocked gaming experience, then ASRock makes gaming and overclocking focused motherboards.

This platform supports DDR5 ECC UDIMMs (not RDIMMs) and has dual channel memory. There are four DIMM slots for two DIMMs per channel. That is great for capacity, but we recently went into Why One DIMM Per Channel or 1DPC Can Be Great for AMD EPYC 4004. Adding a second DIMM to each memory channel lowers the clock speed of the memory.

We managed to get up to 192GB (4x 48GB) of ECC memory running in this platform but it downclocked to DDR5-3600 speeds. Still, if you need memory capacity, then there is a big difference between 96GB and 192GB.

Many of ASRock Rack’s smaller motherboards have moved to smaller power inputs, but this still has a 24-pin ATX power connector on the top edge.

Onboard, we have an ASPEED AST2600 management controller for IPMI and out-of-band management.

Next to that we get two SATA ports. Here is something you might not have noticed with this motherboard, but there is no chipset. Instead, those two SATA ports are powered by an ASMedia 1061 chip. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is more aligned to how modern higher-end servers are built. It also removes a component that adds both cost and power consumption to the board. In previous AMD generations, some chipsets required large heatsinks or active cooling for servers. In this example, the entire component is removed. Instead, some spot functionality like these two SATA ports are brought back via small controllers.

On the bottom, we have a PCIe Gen5 x16 slot and two M.2 slots. This is fewer physical slots than the Lenovo but with the benefit of being very easy to work on.

Those two M.2 slots are PCIe Gen5, but if you use an AMD Ryzen 8000 series processor, they drop to PCIe Gen4 speeds. Many folks see the Socket AM5 and assume all features apply to all models. In reality, they shift based on what is installed, another reason we would simply go with EPYC in this platform.

There are also two MCIO connectors for additional connectivity options. Between the MCIO connectors, the M.2 slots, and the PCIe slots, you might count 40 PCIe lanes (plus those for onboard components) and get excited. We will show more on how this works in the block diagram, but ASRock Rack is providing a lot of flexibility here using those Phison PS7101 chips to mux lanes. We usually do a block diagram section, and this is one where it will be important to look at.

That bottom area aslo has our front panel USB 3 connector, POST code indicator, fan headers, and front panel connectors.

On the rear, we get a serial console port, VGA port, and two USB Type-A ports. There is an out of band management port as well. Something slightly different is that we also get a DisplayPort output as well as a HDMI output. Depending on the processor used in this motherboard, you can actually get a decent iGPU. At the same time, even the EPYC 4004/ EPYC 4005 series has onboard graphics so you can drive a 4K display from the server.

Onboard dual 1GbE networking is provided by a pair of venerable Intel i210-at NICs. Springville has been around for almost 13 years at this point so it is supported in virtually every operating system. Also, the Intel i210 is planned to be around to 2035 so it still has another decade until it will be discontinued according to Intel’s current public plan.

We normally do not show this, but since we have seen some older boards in this class have bottom M.2 slots, we figured we would just show the bottom. Generally, I am not a huge fan of those slots since they become hard to service in most systems. Still, they are not being used here.

Next, let us get to the block diagram since that is very important in this motherboard.