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

When running some benchmarks of the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T against AMD's reference Daytona 2P server platform, the overall CPU/system performance was comparable within 2~3% to this cost effective retail motherboard. For close to three months of testing this ROME2D16-2T motherboard, which was provided by ASRock Rack, it has been working out very well and without any hardware issues.

As some more interesting figures from testing done with this motherboard than just the very similar metrics to Daytona, some of the testing that has been done with this ROME2D16-2T motherboard includes:

- AMD EPYC Milan six month comparison for comparing the Linux performance at launch to where it is today in late 2021 with the various open-source software improvements made during that time.

- AMD EPYC 7003 series performance on autumn 2021 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 21.10, Fedora Server 35, and others/

- Dynatron A39 testing for that high performance 3U+ heatsink.

Plus a variety of other smaller articles it's been used for and a number of other forthcoming Linux performance articles.

Through using the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T with a variety of EPYC 7003 series processors in 1P and 2P configurations, this motherboard has been working out very well.

No issues come to mind from my heavy Linux testing with this motherboard so far and it has been working out well. The only request pretty much would be wanting to see ASRock Rack engaging with FWUPD firmware updating support on Linux and distributing BIOS updates on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, but hopefully with time we'll see more progress on that front.

For those looking to assemble your own AMD EPYC Milan 2P server, I am confident in recommending the ROME2D16-2T with current retail availability and the pricing is competitive in today's climate for the feature set and connectivity provided by this EEB motherboard. Thanks to ASRock Rack for providing the review sample for testing and stay tuned for more performance tests to come utilizing this platform, including various end-of-year Linux tests, fresh GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler testing, and more.