ASRock Rack C2750D4I Review: A Storage Motherboard with Management
by Ian Cutress on April 29, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- Atom
- ASRock
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- server
- Avoton
Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs is a benchmarking wet dream – a highly complex benchmark that can bring the toughest setup and high resolutions down into single figures. Having an extreme SSAO setting can do that, but at the right settings Sleeping Dogs is highly playable and enjoyable. We run the basic benchmark program laid out in the Adrenaline benchmark tool, and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Sleeping Dogs, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates | ||
| Minimum Frame Rates | ||
Company of Heroes 2
Company of Heroes 2 also can bring a top end GPU to its knees, even at very basic benchmark settings. To get an average 30 FPS using a normal GPU is a challenge, let alone a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS. For this benchmark I use modified versions of Ryan’s batch files at 1920x1080 on High. COH2 is a little odd in that it does not scale with more GPUs with the drivers we use.
| Company of Heroes 2, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates | ||
| Minimum Frame Rates | ||
Battlefield 4
The EA/DICE series that has taken countless hours of my life away is back for another iteration, using the Frostbite 3 engine. AMD is also piling its resources into BF4 with the new Mantle API for developers, designed to cut the time required for the CPU to dispatch commands to the graphical sub-system. For our test we use the in-game benchmarking tools and record the frame time for the first ~70 seconds of the Tashgar single player mission, which is an on-rails generation of and rendering of objects and textures. We test at 1920x1080 at Ultra settings.
| Battlefield 4, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates | ||
| 99th Percentile Frame Rates | ||
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mars2k - Saturday, May 31, 2014 - link
I'm with you Up, how did this get sidetrac'd into HTPC, I'm looking for an alternative to some of the stock Qnap and Synology geer for use in my home. Want NAS box with lots of tru put. Not clear on why Ian says no NAS. Whats up with configuring as a NAS? Any other suggestionssamueldes - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Before you buy: the Areca PCIe X8 card won't fit in the ASUS AM1 board with only one PCIe X4 slot.Ammohunt - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Avoton supports intels visualization extensions with 64GB of RAM and 8 cores it could be a decent low powered KVM server sliced up in many different ways.stoatwblr - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I have to say I'm surprised they didn't go with minisas connectors instead of a fistful of satas. Supermicro have done the same thing and it simply doesn't make sense.Samus - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
yeah they could have saved a ton of real estate using mini plugs. Even full sized servers like HP's ML310 series use mini plugs to keep the board clean. Even more important on an ITX board. This board has a lot of oversights, which ASRock will learn is unacceptable in the market they're targeting it at.ericloewe - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
Bad idea in this case, since they're using SATA instead of SAS. Someone would inevitably try to use this with an SAS expander...But I agree with Supermicro having made an odd choice. Their LSI2308-equipped motherboards would be perfectly equipped with SAS connectors.
speculatrix - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
if you're looking more for a media player you can plug into your TV, then one of the many other Baytrail-D motherboards would be suitable... there's a useful list and discussion of them here:http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
i'm probably one of the core target prosumers for this, as for a few years now i've been running something similar at home...namely a sandybridge itx board, 35 Watt i3, ecc ram, supermicro low profile (lsi) sas controller, supermicro 24x (lsi) sas expander backplane, 400w passive psu, passive cpu cooler, 18 sata 2.5" hdds (5200rpm - WD scorpio blue / hitachi travelstar)
and while this board fits my requirements wonderfully while being cheap there is just one dealbreaker... 12x sata? wtf? no-one sane will run so many hdds without a backplane. it's just unmanageable.
the most simple backplane with 12 sata plugs + some power plugs & 12 correctly spaced hdd plugs woud do. and could be manufactured & sold very cheaply. but there is no such thing... (step up asrock :)
bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
to the point: give me such a backplane for below $100 and im sold. else thanks but no thanks.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
With 18 drives, you might want to consider a BackBlaze pod with room for 45 drives, especially now that we have 32 and 40 disk controllers. That with some ZFS would be quite an excellent NAS IMO, and I am heading that way, slowly.