Gigabyte MZ31-AR0: EPYC Motherboard With Dual 10Gb/s LAN, 16 SATA Ports, Seven PCI-E Slots

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gigabyte MZ31-AR0: EPYC Motherboard With Dual 10Gb/s LAN, 16 SATA Ports, Seven PCI-E Slots

When it comes to our AMD EPYC Linux testing the past number of months, one of the most common test requests was to test the Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 motherboard, which is more workstation oriented than traditional server with plenty of PCI Express slots for suiting multiple graphics cards, etc. Over the past month I have been testing out this single-socket AMD EPYC motherboard and overall it has worked out fairly well.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26183

[nuetzel]

@Michael: Can we have photo, specs and Link for the PCI Express adapter to M.2, please.
I'm thinking about some extra loading speed on my 'older' Xeon devel system.

[Zola]

Price is still a bit to much but I guess for those who really need all of that PCI-E lines & slots not to much. Pared with Epyc 7401P it beats complete Intels commercial desktop i9 line with still retaining price advantage along with better capacity for; workstation, mining, development rig as you can put in all those; GPU's, FPGA's or ASICS in.

[Michael]

@Michael: Can we have photo, specs and Link for the PCI Express adapter to M.2, please.
I'm thinking about some extra loading speed on my 'older' Xeon devel system.

This is the adapter - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 - it's been working out fine so far.

[schmidtbag]

Price is still a bit to much but I guess for those who really need all of that PCI-E lines & slots not to much. Pared with Epyc 7401P it beats complete Intels commercial desktop i9 line with still retaining price advantage along with better capacity for; workstation, mining, development rig as you can put in all those; GPU's, FPGA's or ASICS in.

You do know this is meant for large-scale servers, right? That being said, not only is this price point pretty average, but Epyc competes with Xeons, not i9s.

[Tomin]

Besides the 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports it would have been nice if Gigabyte still included a Gigabit Ethernet port for those not yet prepared to make the investment into 10 Gigabit.

Do you mean that there is no regular ethernet port on the board, just those SFP-ports? In the picture above there seems to be an ethernet port there. I would imagine that it supports 1000BASE-T. Or is it just for management?

Btw, what kind of idle power consumpion these EPYC systems have?

[Michael]

Do you mean that there is no regular ethernet port on the board, just those SFP-ports? In the picture above there seems to be an ethernet port there. I would imagine that it supports 1000BASE-T. Or is it just for management?

That Ethernet port is just for the BMC.

[ddriver]

They layout is pukatronic. Way to render half of the PCIE slots unusable for long cards. I'd prefer to scrap half the ram slots, even if you go for udimms you can get 128 gigs of ram in there, which is plenty for the vast majority of tasks and you don't lose half of the PCIE slots. And the extra board space could have hosted a couple of extra M2 slots, which will not interfere with long PCIE cards. A CPU with 128 PCIE lanes, and just a single M2, really? And half of the PCIE slots blocked out? Great thinking there gigabyte...

Alas, while EPYC is great for servers, the complete absence of lower core higher clock parts makes it less than ideal for workstations. It is OK for stuff like rendering, but performs very poorly in scenarios that are clock sensitive like for example DAW. It is disappointingly slow at workloads that cannot scale up to the full amount of cores, but even for those that do scale well, you have to buy the very expensive 24 and 32 core parts to get it to make up for the low clocks.

AMDs EPYC lineup is very lacking in this aspect. Ryzen and TR have shown that the core can do 3.4 to 3.6 Ghz with a decent amount of efficiency, yet instead of having higher clocks for the lower core EPYC parts, clocks are actually even lower.

8 core EPYC at 2.1 Ghz base clock when they also have a 32 core part at 2.2 Ghz base clock.

The top 16 core part has 2.9 Ghz boost clock, while the 32 core part has 3.2 GHz. The 8 core part is also capped at 2.9 boost. Seriously? 8 cores cannot go higher than 32 cores?

Lower core server parts are a HUGE market, and AMD is not even trying to address it, with that single 8 core pathetic clocks part.

WTF AMD? There should be a 3.2 GHz base clock 8 core part and a 3 GHz 16 core part. Uniprocessor at a competitive price.

TR is fine and dandy and the cost is decent, but without official commitment to ECC support, and the iffy implementations on the boards that do seem to support it, I cannot honestly consider it a viable workstation solution.

Such a shame that even with a very strong and highly competitive architecture, a great deal of people still have no choice but to buy overpriced intel parts.

[R41N3R]

When I added an external adapter card for my second M2 SSD I couldn't access the UEFI anymore on my Asus Prime X370-pro board after a UEFI firmware update. Asus was incapable to support and it was up to me to do the annoying trouble shooting.

@Michael: Did you try to boot without the external adapter card as well?

[Michael]

When I added an external adapter card for my second M2 SSD I couldn't access the UEFI anymore on my Asus Prime X370-pro board after a UEFI firmware update. Asus was incapable to support and it was up to me to do the annoying trouble shooting.

@Michael: Did you try to boot without the external adapter card as well?

Yes it works fine, I have Ubuntu on one drive and Windows Server on the other.