German news outlet HardwareLuxx noticed a fascinating LGA4094 motherboard for AMD’s EPYC processors in ASRock Rack’s arsenal. For the uninitiated, ASRock Rack is ASRock’s elite server division.
ASRock Rack engineered the ROMED8-2T to house both EPYC 7001-series (Naples) and EPYC 7002-series (Rome) processors. The motherboard features the standard LGA4094 (Socket SP3) socket and adheres to the ATX form factor. The ROMED8-2T is a server product, after all, so ASRock crafted it with a green PCB and it lacks fancy heatsinks or RGB bling.
This board comes with the ultimate in connectivy: AMD’s EPYC 7002-series chips deliver an impressive 128 high-speed PCIe 4.0 lanes, and ASRock Rack is keen to take advantage of them. Therefore, the ROMED8-2T is equipped with nothing less than seven PCIe 4.0 x16 lanes to exploit the latest and fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs and enterprise graphics cards on the market right now. Only the second PCIe 4.0 x16 slot shares bandwidth with the mini-SAS, M.2 and OCuLink connectors.
The motherboard has eight DDR4 memory slots that support different formats. It’s compatible with 32GB RDIMMs (Registered DIMMs), 256GB LRDIMMs (Load-Reduced DIMMs) and 32GB NVDIMMs (Non-volatile DIMMs). The official memory speed supported across all three formats is 3,200 MHz.
The ROMED8-2T boasts a very unique and advanced storage configuration. There are two mini-SAS connectors to support up to eight SATA III drives in total and one SATA DOM port. The motherboard exposes two OCuLink connectors for U.2 SSDs. It also has two M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 ports. Although both M.2 ports support PCIe-and SATA-based SSDs, the primary port accommodates drives up to 80mm in length while the secondary port can hold SSDs up to 110mm.
In addition to the enormous amount of PCIe 4.0 x16 lanes, the ROMED8-2T also has other neat features. Intel’s X550-AT2 controller provides the motherboard with two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports while Realtek’s RTL8211E controller manages the single Gigabit Ethernet port.
The ROMED8-2T incorporates Aspeed’s AST2500 server management processor. The AST2500 features an 800 MHz Arm11 processor and 512MB of DDR4 memory. It’s responsible for supplying the VGA port on the motherboard.
The rear panel’s other interfaces include one COM port, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port. You shouldn’t have to worry though since the motherboard integrates one USB 3.1 Gen 1 header and one USB 3.1 Gen 2 header. The combination should be good for another four additional USB 3.0 ports.