Gigabyte MZ31-AR0: EPYC Motherboard With Dual 10Gb/s LAN, 16 SATA Ports, Seven PCI-E Slots

Accessing the web-based embedded management software for the BMC is very straight forward. The functionality from their web interface is similar to that of other modern server boards.

Fortunately, the embedded management software's virtual KVM viewer is HTML5-based! Sadly there still exist some vKVM solutions out there that require Java, but fortunately Gigabyte's MZ31-AR0 plays happily with modern HTML5 web browsers.

Using the Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 motherboard the past month has been working out well. Initially though it was a bit headache-inducing when it came to updating the BIOS. The motherboard shipped with BIOS F03, but initially when trying to upgrade the BIOS -- at first via UEFI and then later from the web-based management software -- I was unable to get the system to boot. The latest F06 yielded an unbootable system, when flashing via the BMC to the F04 software, the system still did not boot. That included trying to debug the situation with different memory modules, clearing the CMOS, switching to the backup BIOS, etc. Long story short, I have been unable to get any newer BIOS past F03 to boot.

When opening a ticket with Gigabyte, the situation ended up going unresolved. At least the F03 BIOS has been working out great and hopefully the F07 or later BIOS will end up working again. Gigabyte had reported there were not any known issues with the newer BIOS, but even when trying to re-flash back to F06 again, I still get the system in the same unbootable state.

Aside from those initial BIOS headaches, the rest of the experience has been going great. Testing has been done with all of the major Linux distributions without any fusses and also does work fine as well with Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

The system configuration for the most part has been with an AMD EPYC 7551 32-core/64-thread processor, 8 x 4GB DDR4-2666 Micron RDIMMs, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970, and 2 x 500GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSDs. The CPU air cooling has worked out great with Noctua's EPYC coolers.

Among the recent benchmarks featuring this Gigabyte EPYC setup have included Ubuntu 18.04 Versus Six Other Linux Distributions On AMD EPYC, some Windows Server vs. Linux network benchmarks, and was also featured in the recent POWER9 benchmarks against Xeon and EPYC. This EPYC 7551 + Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 configuration will also be used in some other upcoming Linux server and workstation benchmarks.

Aside from the frustration of not being able to get newer versions of the BIOS working nicely on this hardware, the Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 has now been working out well for over the past month. This EPYC motherboard retails for about $630 USD, which is in line with other single-socket EPYC motherboards. Those wishing to find out more about this EPYC 7000 series motherboard can do so at Gigabyte.com.