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
ASRock C2750D4I In The Box
Server motherboard packages are almost confusing. On the one hand it is a premium product that should get premium treatment, especially if it is end-user facing rather than server customer facing. The counter argument to this comes from server motherboard users knowing exactly what they want to use, so why waste money adding equipment that might not be applicable? The variation of cases or server chassis mean it is almost pointless to add something like a USB bay or rear bracket.
Nevertheless ASRock offers the following with the C2750D4I:
Driver DVD
Manual
Rear IO Shield
Four SATA Cables
Being a motherboard aimed at storage we should be glad that at least some cables are there, but this is only 1/3 of the number of SATA ports on the motherboard. In a server case I would imagine that all the cables are of appropriate length, and that can be hard to judge – so some is better than none but not as useless as more. If that makes any sense.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies and SSDs.
Thank you to ADATA for providing us with memory.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD HD7970 GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Also thank you to Silverstone for sending us the DS380 case.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor |
Intel Avoton C2750 8 Cores, 2.4 GHz (2.6 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ASRock C2750D4I |
| Cooling | Basic 8cm Fan |
| Power Supply |
OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Silverstone 300W SFX PSU |
| Memory | ADATA XPG V1.0 2x8GB DDR3L-1600 9-11-9 1.35V Kit |
| Memory Settings | XMP |
| Video Cards |
MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) ASUS HD7970 3GB (Reference) |
| Video Drivers |
AMD Catalyst 13.12 WHQL NVIDIA Drivers 332.21 WHQL |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Silverstone DS380 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
We added in the results from our 25W Kabini platform we are currently testing for a future review, just to show how much difference having the extra controllers and the remote management effects our idle and power loadings. It would therefore reveal that the extra featureset on the C2750D4I equates to 7-10W on our test bed.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
The issue with remote management systems is always the pre-initialisation time, which on the C2750D4I is unforgiving. However, it is often not a focus of a system such as this which might remain in constant operation for several years without a restart.
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SuperSpy00bob - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Oops. I it's only mentioned in the spec chart, not in the article itself. It seemed like a glaring omission.JBVertexx - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
For home use, I don't know why you would pay so much for such a low-end processor. For $40 more you can have this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... plus a Xeon E3-1230v3.I'm running a home server on an E3-1230v2 (even cheaper), and it handles storage, Plex transcoding to everyone's devices, offloaded Blu-Ray Rip transcoding, and hosts several VMs running minecraft servers for the kids. No way you could do all that with this board.
djb61 - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I've actually built a storage box recently using a fairly similar setup for a home NAS. I used the supermicro C2750 board however and added an IBM M1015 SAS card flashed to an IT mode LSI 9211-8i firmware for the disks. Then I have 8x4TB WD Reds in the Silverstone DS380.I'm still doing initial stress testing to make sure there are no dodgy disks etc currently so I can't comment about actual day to day use of such a system yet.
One thing I did notice with the DS380 is there appears to be a minor design flaw in the trays/backplane which is visible in the pictures here also.
The HDD trays have a clear perspex light guide built into the right side of them which allows an activity LED for the port on the backplane to illuminate to the front of the tray. This is the little square notch visible on the right hand side of the trays in the pictures here. However the activity light for the 4th bay from the top (5th from the bottom) doesn't illuminate on the tray properly despite it clearly lighting up on the backplane board. If you look at the picture of the backplane board and note the component labelled LED5 and its position relevant to the connector SATA13 and compare this to all the other LED and SATA components. The relative positioning on this bay is different and therefore is not aligned with the light guide on the HDD tray. I'm not quite sure how they managed to let that slip through the design stage but maybe Anandtech could feed it back to Silverstone.
azazel1024 - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
Why would you test power consumption in that config? It tells you nothing as it isn't remotely comparable to what it actually uses by itself or how you'd normally be using it.jwcalla - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
People are reporting that ASRock is pretty much treating this as a Windows-only board. If you have problems on other OSes, don't expect support from them.And with a Marvell controller... we can expect problems.
Krautmaster - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
well, be bechmarks are a mess for a server board like this. Why not any VM benches or Storage Benches ...I used that board for Storage Tiering in Server 2013 R2 with 3x4Tb + 4x2 TB + 2x256GB SSDs see here http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=...
Bronek - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
It's worth saying that this motherboard supports up to 64GB of ECC memory. Thanks Ian, I think you just identified parts I will need for my FreeNAS build :)copilusntil0p@ - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
1. It's interesting how the used the PLX chipset givint tha fact that the Avoton is a SoC ant tha NICs ar integrated in it. 2. To those yelling "drop BMC": this board is not for you; don't judge it for what is not. 3. I've been in the situation to chose between this board and a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F for a home server. I've choose the latter and paired it with an HP P400 with 512MB cache and BBU (50$ on e-bay). So now I have a preety decent box with 5 gigabit interfeces, IPMI via AST2400 and 14 SATA ports (6 onboard from the SoC and eight SAS-to-SATA from the HP controller backed-up by 512MB of DDR2 cache). I've attached one Samsung 840 Pro SSD to one of the SATA 3 ports for SSD caching on ESXi. An givving the fact that the board comes from a manufacturer with greater experience in the server market, has an upgraded BMC controller, management software, wider accessory range (cases, controllers etc), has all LAN ports available, four USB 3 ports (one is directly attached to the board).LastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Interesting build. I thought about this route as well and since I will be using KVM, the ASRock solution is good enough for me while keeping the part count as a minimal. Have I gone to ESXi and need more ethernet ports, that Supermicro + HP solution is the way to go with only a slight penalty in power savings.dzezik - Thursday, May 8, 2014 - link
What a stupid review. Find nothing about storage performance. You used storage motherboard and stroge enclosure to test gaming performance. Who is using his NAS server for gaming?