AsRock X470D4U
AM4, AMD X470, mATX
Product ratings
Pros
Cons
3 reviews
Good board for home server / NAS / white box enthusiasts with experience.
It is not a gaming board. The settings are minimal, overclocking is not available, fan curves cannot be adjusted or only to a very limited extent, the scope of delivery is a bit tight with board, ATX IO shield and a single SATA cable. Especially for a server board, a 1U rack IO shield would have been nice.
The BIOS is unspectacular, quite classic without mouse support or larger graphics.
The ports are a bit bipolar: For a server I miss the USB2.0 header (many server chassis don't have USB3 on the front panel), for a (more powerful) workstation the ports on the back are a bit tight (2x USB3.1 Type A).
Question marks on the forehead also arise from the 2 M.2 slots: One is PCIe2.0 x4, the other PCIe 3.0 x2. This slows down today's best SSDs (~2 GB/s slot vs > 3GB/s SSD, e.g. in the Samsung 970 Evo Plus). Clearly, neither CPU nor chipset has unlimited bandwidth, but that is quite a shortcoming should you have larger IO operations in mind.
There are enough SATA ports with 8 for a medium-sized NAS.
As far as that goes, you'd be better off with a $100 gaming board. The killer feature here is IPMI.
Monitor, mouse and keyboard for maintenance? Not necessary. With the Board Management Controller (BMC) you have a (weak) graphics chip and mouse and keyboard always connected and manage the machine via a web interface. (Yes, also the BIOS and the boot process itself).
In addition, the board has its own Ethernet port (perhaps not necessarily pass through to the Internet :) ; 2 additional for normal data traffic are available).
Especially cool: Instead of creating a CD / USB stick with the OS, you can pass an ISO directly via the browser to the BMC, which then emulates a CD drive, so everything looks normal for the OS itself.
Due to the AM4 socket and the x470 chipset, strong processors are supported, so VMs are no problem either. Official unbuffered ECC support is also available.
So far, so good.
10Gbit NICs would have been quite nice (at least a 10Gbit port). A sister product has this, but it's still quite fresh and probably more expensive: https://www.asrockrack.com/general... . The Intel 210 chips are more on the consumer side, it could have been something better (no SR-IOV or similar). The port selection is a bit strange in places, and the headers are not compatible with Supermicro front panel connectors (but you can get almost anything with a bit of tinkering). But the board is solid and the BMC saves a lot of trouble and material.
But there is one big problem: The price. AsRock itself gives the price with ~220 US$ without taxes. Various German retailers are at 240€ without VAT. 330 CHF is too much for what is offered; 250-280 CHF would be fair.
Due to the price and the weak NICs, one star is lost.Pro
- 8x SATA III
- 2x M.2
- BMC for easy maintenance
- Enough ports to act as a firewall / small router
- Socket with support for modern and powerful CPUs
- Standard ATX connectors
- Own IPMI port
Contra
- Scope of delivery unspectacular (just rather intended for companies)
- Comparatively weak Ethernet controller
- Slow M.2 slots (~2GB/s)
- Non-adjustable fan curves
- Rather expensive
All as advertized
Works really nice. No fiddling.
My only complain are:
Just 2 USB 3 ports at the back are limiting. I.e. if you want to plug a USB drive, keyboard and mouse. Fortunately I use a IBM keyboard that has keyboard and mouse (trackpoint) integrated into one device, so it only uses one cable. But using separate mouse, or some USB accessories (i.e. WiFi, Audio DAC, etc), could be problematic.
Lack of USB2 header on board, to connect to older cases, or accessories. Only one dual USB3 port is on board (beyond the one at the back).
VGA only supports 1280x1024. That is okish, but somehow limiting. VGA should support more. It would be nice to be able to use 1600x1200 or 1920x1080. This makes things like opening multiple terminals, or browsing the web, displaying monitoring a way easier. It is not a big issue, because most people will not use VGA at all, in headless operation, or with separate GPU. Granted, it might be actually an issue with my monitor, and not a problem with BMC.
The first boot is really slow, especially if you are not connected to network, but it gets there eventually.
No U.2 ports, but it should be easy to convert using the M.2 to U.2 port adpater (i.e. from Delock).
Local and remote ipmi tools work. If you have SMBus capable PSU, it can be connected using extra header, for extra PSU information (like input voltage, power in and out, etc). Without it, the board still monitors and exports a lot of sensors, including chasis sensors, temperature, fan sensors, and accurate voltage measurements.
There is also a nice web interface, but I didn't actually tried it.
I am using right now a Ryzen 3700X, with non-ECC memory modules. But ECC is supported partially too (it will correct errors transparently, but not necessary report a problem back to OS, to notify you about the need to investigate).
Also, the board has audio support via an extra header on board. I have no idea how it works, but lspci shows some audio stuff integrated into my Ryzen 3700X.Pro
- Relatively small, standard microATX
- IPMI, sensors, etc
- Plenty of fan connectors
- Two M.2 ports
- No RGB
- ECC support
- 3200MT/s RAM support
- 128GB RAM support
- IPMI supports power control
- IPMI supports IPv6
- VGA from BMC
- VGA works out of the box on Linux
- Separate dedicated IPMI LAN port
- Can share IPMI LAN with other port as option
- Good placement of fan and power connectors
- Dual 1Gbps networking
- Excellent price
- Proper heatsinks on VRM and south bridge chipset. Runs cool.
- Physicaial DB9 serial port
- Serial port accessible using IPMI and Web interface
Contra
- No USB2 headers
- Just 2 USB 3 at the back are limiting
- No U.2 ports
- First/cold boot is really slow
- No digital video from BMC
- Video maxes at 1280x1024
- No SFP+ 10Gbps port, but there is version with 2x 10GBase-T ports
- Idle power 30W is a bit high.
Top price-performance ratio for a simple server board with IPMI!
Runs great with a Linux Debian (without GUI).
Pro
- IPMI
- 2 NICs
- Many SATA connections
Contra
- Not for gamers
- BIOS update can cause problems via IPMI
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