ASRock Rack TURIND8-2L2T Cooling
One of the more interesting challenges these days is also finding compatible coolers with a system, especially if you are using one of the sockets meant for larger dual-socket servers. The reason for this is simple. As TDPs have increased, along with integration and I/O footprints, we have seen the market favor pre-built customized systems. With fewer standard-sized motherboards like this one in the market, coolers have become a challenging niche. Arctic sent its 4U-SP5 (Amazon Affiliate) solution and we used it on this motherboard. A major advantage is that this is a 4U cooler with a big heatsink, dual fans, and a much lower (sub $60) price tag than higher-end consumer options.
One challenge with the heatisnk is just how big it is in order to support 120mm fans to keep the noise down. The heatsink fins needed to be larger, so they actually overhang the DDR5 RDIMM slots. This may seem like a small annoyance, but once the platform is installed, these large 4U coolers often extend to cover the memory slots. In a cramped system, these can be a pain.
We will have a more in-depth piece on the Arctic Freezer 4U-SP5 soon, but it is a neat option for those looking at a motherboard like this to create a quiet storage, virtualization, or AI server.
Key Lessons Learned
This motherboard is really neat since it uses 135 PCIe lanes, including 128x PCIe Gen5 lanes from the SP5 platform. Just fitting so much onto the motherboard meant that there were trade-offs made.
Some useful examples of the trade-offs are the lack of an ATX 24-pin power connector and having fewer DDR5 RDIMM slots. The three 12V ATX power connector situation is one that can be solved for, and it is one we have seen before. When it comes to the memory, a year ago, when we were paying $350-400 for a 64GB DDR5 ECC RDIMM, I would have been harder on this. With prices skyrocketing and with the 400W TDP limit of the platform, perhaps 8-channel memory just makes more sense. ASRock Rack needed to make this trade-off to get the PCIe configuration it did, but sacrifices were made.
Final Words
The ASRock Rack TURIND8-2L2T motherboard surprised us in a way. So long as you are OK with the 400W TDP limit and the 8-channels of DDR5 memory, then this is a really flexible platform. If you wanted to build a virtualization server with GPUs for AI or VDI, and also wanted lots of fast storage, then a platform like this is super useful since it tucks nicely into many tower and 4U rackmount cases. I think a lot of the community will value having access to all of the PCIe I/O over adding more memory capacity.
If you were looking to build your own AMD SP5 socket platform, then the ASRock Rack TURIND8-2L2T is a great option that exceeded our expectations when going into this review.
You’re not actually supposed to max out the saturation slider.