ASRock Rack EPYCD8 Series Make For Great Value AMD EPYC Motherboards With Rome Support

For those that have been interested in AMD's EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for your own server build, more 7002 series supported motherboards have been hitting Internet stores in recent weeks. If you are looking for one of the lower-cost motherboards, ASRock Rack's EPYCD8 motherboards have been refined with 7001/7002 series processor support.

The AsRock Rack EPYCD8 and EPYCD8-2T have been available from NewEgg and other Internet retailers in recent weeks. At least from NewEgg, it's been a battle keeping the EPYCD8 in stock with it going in/out of stock every few days (I've been closely monitoring the listings while waiting for them to appear and evaluating options for an affordable yet reliable EPYC 7002 retail motherboard). In the case of the ASRock Rack EPYCD8, it's the only sub-$500 Rome-supported motherboard I have seen from the major Internet retailers. As of Monday morning, these boards appear to be back in stock at NewEgg after being out-of-stock the past number of the days.

I picked up the updated ASRock Rack EPYCD8 earlier this month in order to have a retail 7002 series Rome motherboard for carrying out some thermal/power consumption rather than using the reference server platform. Those benchmark results and power metrics for the EPYCD8 with my available AMD EPYC 7002 series processors will start coming out in the days ahead -- in particular the EPYC 7302 / 7402, EPYC 7642, and EPYC 7502 / 7742 processors.

The updated EPYCD8 motherboards unfortunately do not support PCI Express 4.0 or any other changes to the motherboard but simply switch out a 16MB BIOS chip for a 32MB ROM chip. With that, also shipping the latest BIOS/firmware for handling these new EPYC 7002 Rome processors while maintaining support for the EPYC 7001 Naples series. So if buying one of the latest ASRock Rack EPYC motherboards from the likes of NewEgg, it's good to go with these newest AMD server processors.

The BIOS chip capacity has been a limitation for many original EPYC motherboards in not having 7002 series support for this reason and not anything specific to ASRock Rack.

This is now the third ASRock Rack motherboard for EPYC CPUs I use though the first with Rome. All of these ASRock Rack motherboards continue working out well even with my routine daily stress to them from benchmarking. Besides the EPYCD8, the EPYCD8-2T works well for those wanting dual 10G connectivity (via Intel X550 chipset) so all in was another good investment.

So if looking for an ATX AMD EPYC 1P 7001/7002 motherboard with eight channel DDR4 memory support, nine SATA 3.0 ports, dual M.2 PCIe, dual Gigabit LAN, and four PCI Express x16 slots (and three PCIe x8), the EPYCD8 is a very capable option for just $499 USD. Stay tuned for the Rome power efficiency benchmarks from this board in the near future.