ASRock Rack C236M WS Micro ATX Skylake Xeon Motherboard

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASRock Rack C236M WS Micro ATX Skylake Xeon Motherboard

Recently I picked up the ASRock C236M WS motherboard as a micro-ATX board for supporting Skylake LGA-1151 Xeon processors. This motherboard has been running nicely under Linux.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=23081

[site_owner]

Hi.

This board looks like an ideal candidate for home server/nas/media/lab combo. 4 memory slots, 8 sata ports, possible expansion with 10gbe NIC and/or HBA.
Can you measure power usage?
Only missing thing would be IPMI/iKVM.

Have a nice day.

[hetzbh]

Hi,
I just got 2 questions:
1. What processor do you have and what is it's price?
2. In the last picture - which case is that? looks really interesting...

[Michael]

Hi,
I just got 2 questions:
1. What processor do you have and what is it's price?
2. In the last picture - which case is that? looks really interesting...

1235L on this particular motherboard, but it works with any of what I tested recently in this 9-way comparison: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22871

Case is: http://www.amazon.com/NORCO-Rack-Mou...ywords=2U+case

[starshipeleven]

Ah cool, the modern version of Teh First microAtx workstation board EVAR (basically same features but socket 1155), made by the company that also offers Teh First socket 2011 mini-itx board, and the famous Avoton-based boards (8-core Atoms for cold storage and home servers).

Asrock rack engineers are sure creative, none else comes even close to that.

@Michael: Can you add screenshots of the BIOS configuration screens? Finding screens of BIOS of these kinds of boards is rare. (while everyone and their dog has screenshots of gaming boards)
Older series of these boards had pages dedicated to the workstation/server features like ECC, it isn't a semi-hidden setting switchable between "disabled" or "auto".

Also, doing ECC tests the olde way (covering some data pins of the ECC dimms to cause predictable ECC errors, need to dig out the info) would be nice too, but might be a bit too annoying and out of the scope of this site (being ECC unrelated to linux).

[GraysonPeddie]

Has anyone built a fanless rackmount server? You would want to choose a CPU with a low TDP such as 25W or less.

I have an AMD Athlon 5350 APU with ASRock AM1H-ITX motherboard. It's powered by 19v 90W power brick that's plugged into my motherboard's DC-IN connector. With a Hauppauge 1250 TV tuner, one SSD and 2.5" 2TB hard drive, it consumes about 20W idle. For my heatsink, it's an Arctic Alpine M1 in my Rosewell Legacy V6-S case.

I'm thinking about going for rackmount+HDHomeRun setup, but I'm not sure if a heatsink that measures 70m tall could fit in a 2U rackmount case.

[starshipeleven]

fanless and rackmount don't usually mix well. Rackmount is high-density low-natural-air-flow, and to passive cool you need space and airflow.

[torsionbar28]

I do like a good Micro ATX motherboard. I'm not sure why, but this form factor seems to have fallen out of favor recently. The Mini-ITX fad has taken over. IMO Micro-ATX is just the right size board in terms of features and expansion slots. There's so few Micro ATX cases on the market today though. And even fewer that use the SFX type power supplies. You can get SFX power supplies up to 600w nowadays, there's really no reason for a full-sized ATX power supply when building a smaller Micro ATX system. A quick search shows maybe 3 choices of Micro ATX cases with SFX power supply, I wish the market offered more options.