AMD Makes A Compelling Case For Budget-Friendly Ryzen Dedicated Servers

AMD also sent over an ASRock Rack 1U4LW-X570/2L2T server for local testing. The ASRock Rack 1U4LW-X570/2L2T is a 1U server designed for Ryzen 5000 series processors and makes use of the ASRockRack X570D4U-2L2T motherboard. This platform allows for four DDR4 memory slots either ECC or non-ECC UDIMMs and up to 32GB per DIMM, with the server we were lent for testing having the full 128GB ECC memory setup with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor.

The 1U4LW-X570/2L2T has four hot swap 3.5-inch HDD/SSD bays and three fixed 2.5-inch HDD/SSD bays. Additionally, there are two M.2 slots on the motherboard itself. This 1U barebones server can also handle a full height PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot card, dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet via an Intel X550-AT2 controller, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports using an Intel i210 controller. Plus, of course, with being a server board there is remote IPMI connectivity with the BMC (ASpeed AST2500). The 1U4LW-X570/2L2T has a 400 Watt single power supply.

In using the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-X570/2L2T for a few weeks, this has been working out well and reliably and our first time trying a server-focused Ryzen motherboard. I have used ASRock Rack in the past with some EPYC motherboards to good success too, in personally purchasing some of them for their affordability and availability from major Internet retailers in the US.

Virtualization was working fine with the Ryzen 9 5950X across various server-minded workloads. See various reference benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page. Docker and KVM were tested and working out fine on this platform, which should be as no surprise given we have been successfully using KVM virtualization on Ryzen going back to the original Zen 1 processors without issue. AMD TSME memory encryption can also be enabled for those interested from the BIOS.

I also tested a number of Linux distributions on this platform including Alma Linux 8.5, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 35810, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, an Ubuntu 22.04 snapshot, and openSUSE Leap 15.3. In the coming days I'll have some benchmarks looking at the Windows vs. Linux performance on this AMD Ryzen server platform for those interested.

All of the Linux distributions tested had worked fine on this ASRock Rack Ryzen server with no compatibility problems exhibited. This shouldn't be much of a surprise though considering the maturity of the Ryzen 5000 series and AMD X570 chipset. Any modern OS should run fine on the server as well as the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD too.