Although Patrick was sidelined with baby STH, we still had a small team contingent at Computex 2024 in Taipei. One booth that the team visited last week was the MSI booth. MSI is probably best known for making consumer motherboards, GPUs, and other peripherals. Now the company is using its motherboard expertise to transition into the server market. At the show, the team saw new AMD EPYC 4004 motherboards with 10GbE and even 25GbE built-in.
MSI D3051 10Gbase-T Motherboard
Here is a really interesting board, the MSI D3051. Many of the motherboard we have seen for EPYC 4004 servers are 1GbE only. This has both dual Intel i210-AT 1GbE ports, but also dual 10Gbase-T ports using Intel X710 IP.
Aside from the networking, we can see PCIe slots, dual M.2 slots, and several SATA ports. MSI also has a really neat array of fan headers in front of the memory slots.
As a mATX board, we also get an ASPEED AST2600 BMC. You can find the specs above.
While that is the 10Gbase-T version, there is a 25GbE alternative as well.
MSI D3052 25GbE AMD EPYC 4004 Motherboard
The MSI D3052 is in many ways similar, in layout, with some major differences. For example, there the PCIe slot moved. Another big change is that the 1GbE ports are no longer present, but we now get a SFP28 solution for 25GbE built-in via an onboard Intel E810-XXV NIC.
This is another mATX board, but we are not sure where the second M.2 slot is that is listed on the specs.
Still, 25GbE is going to be a big feature for many folks, especially when paired with the EPYC 4004 CPUs.
Final Words
These are cool motherboards, and it is great to see MSI using higher-end networking onboard. While many servers using these chips will undoubtedly be built around 1GbE networking, having an onboard option for 10Gbase-T or SFP28 25GbE is different which makes these boards very interesting.
If you want to learn more about the AMD EPYC 4004 series, you can also watch our video here:
The MSI website lists the D3052 as only having a single M.2 slot, so it looks like that might be a typo on the booth marketing materials:
https://eps.msi.com/en/product/server-motherboards/D3052-D3052GB2N-25G
SATA 2.0 in 2024? They couldn’t find a cheap enough 3.0 controller for those two ports?
Where there any Mini-ITX Epyc 4004 motherboards on display at any of the vendors?
@Kyle, what strikes me as a bit interesting is putting SATA DOM on the one of the SATA 3 ports(as well as having SATA DOM at all; perhaps I overestimate just how thoroughly m.2 has replaced the practice of buying surprisingly expensive ultra-low-performance vendor specific SATA SSDs). I would have expected them to leave 4x SATA 3 for people who still need the classic 1U 3.5in configuration for cheap bulk storage(especially if there’s any sort of chipset RAID); and to put the DOM on the ‘eh, who cares, it only really sees activity at boot time’ SATA2.
Finally, 2x M.2 Slots! Asrock Racks B650 only had 1x options.
@TheTamago
Asrockrack B650D4U Supports 1 M.2 (PCIe5.0 x4), 1 M.2 (PCIe4.0 x4)
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=B650D4U#Specifications
Still a terrible pci layout for a storage server, splitt the x16 to 4Gx2 and 1Gx8 pci and you will have good way to customize to need. Since for a low end 10Gbits (1. 25GB/s) server, there is no need single 121GB/s card, or 4G M2x4 at 30GB/s. For M2 lots of x1 slots would be better.
WTH is the point of an x16 PCIe5 slot on a low end sever platform? Does MSI see a use case for 400Gb/s networking amongst the budget crowd?
It’s a gaming board design slightly tarted up – add a 10 or 25 Gb/s controller and install the ECC RAM BIOS and call it ‘server’. Much what I expected to be bruited. And why not, since ‘epyc 4004’ is +/- a desktop chip.
I can’t help but notice that none of the EPYC 4004 motherboards or servers have support for any U.2 or U.3 NVMe drives, is this a limitation of the cpu/chipset?
From MSI manual for D3051:
Expansion Slot
(1) PCIe 5.0 x16 slot from CPU
(1) PCIe 4.0 x8 slot (x4 signal) from CPU(shares link with M2_1)
In case you missed it, I’ll point out the last set of parentheses above.
Also, Newegg has the 10G-less, 1G-only version of D3051 for $349. I don’t know why anyone would want a 10G-less version, especially when combined with the above info from manual.
@MOSFET – server board needs multiple x8 electrical slots. An x16 electrical PCIe5 slot is a waste of available bandwidth. That slot should be split out into an x8 and multiple x4 connections. But that would require making a server board and not repurposing a desktop design.