ASRock Rack's ROME2D16-2T Makes For A Great EPYC Server Board

For those looking to assemble your own AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series 2P server or workstation, the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T we have been testing out for the past quarter and it's been holding up well across our daily benchmarking and other Linux and BSD tasks. The board has been working out very well and is currently available from retailers like NewEgg.

The ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T is an EEB sized server motherboard with out-of-the-box support for the latest-generation AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors as well as prior generation EPYC 7003 processors. This 2P motherboard offers eight memory channel slots per socket and the motherboard can safely accommodate up through the highest-end 280 Watt Milan processors.

The ROME2D16-2T offers a lot of connectivity options including five PCI Express 4.0 x16 and one PCIe 4.0 x8 slot. two SlimSAS connections, two OCulink connections, two M.2 slots, and four SATA 3.0 slots. On the network side this ASRock Rack motherboard has dual 10GbE connections.

Around the motherboard are plenty of 4/6-pin fan headers, which is great if aiming for a high-end EPYC server build.

The BMC controller on the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T is the widely-used AST2500. For remote management the ROME2D16-2T makes use of the MegaRAC SP-X web interface, which continues working out well for today's needs and also the much appreciated HTML5 web standards based iKVM solution. ASRock Rack currently doesn't support system BIOS/firmware updates via LVFS/FWUPD but the BMC and system firmware updates can be easily carried out from the BMC web interface.

The ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T is available from retail Internet channels like NewEgg currently for a price of $719 USD, which is on the more cost effective side for an AMD EPYC 2P motherboard in today's economic conditions. Supermicro EPYC 2P motherboards at NewEgg meanwhile are $800~1080 with similar feature-sets. There isn't a whole lot of different retail motherboards currently available for EPYC Milan 2P so if looking to assemble a cost effective EPYC Milan server, the ROME2D16-2T will likely be among the more affordable options.