ASRock Brings 56-Core Xeon W3400 to Deep MicroATX | Hacker News Reader

ASRock Brings 56-Core Xeon W3400 to Deep MicroATX

tomshardware.com

57 pointsrbanffy55 comments

Looks interesting, not sure what "deep" MicroATX is other than being out of spec for MicroATX by about 19 sq. inches. I like the high core count of the Xeon processors but 15x price premium over top of the line desktop/or enthusiast CPUs is hard to justify for anything outside large corporation or research activity.

Old hotness: Building a computer in a huge EATX case with lots of room to work, multi-gpu SLI, and massive airflow for overclocking that fits (12) 3.5" HDD.

New hotness: Building a computer in custom mini/microatx form factor w/ watercooling and massive amount of cores and memory running nearly silent

I did a mini ATX build, it is a good way to get some of the old fashioned PC building flavor: Working with terribly un-ergonomic cases, and worrying about compatibility issues.

> Looks interesting, not sure what "deep" MicroATX is other than being out of spec for MicroATX by about 19 sq. inches

Look at the orientation of the ram slots and the fins on the heatsinks, this is clearly designed for 1U and 2U rackmount chassis front to rear airflow. The board being slightly smaller than regular ATX is helpful in fitting more ridiculous-speed 40mm height fans into the center of a chassis that isn't too deep.

> running nearly silent

That's the play.

My play was always to build big cases with water-cooling + low speed fan radiator sandwich for near silence.

Next gen play is to accomplish near silence in a much form factor because super towers take a lot of space and moving them sucks.

Tbh the three main things that suck about desktop computers for me are:

- lots of cables everywhere

- when you bring it with you on travels it feels like it’s gonna fall apart internally

- external monitor is difficult to safely bring as well. (This one is a problem with the laptop as well because I still use an external monitor there.)

This is why I have always been a fan of my work flow being based around thin clients.

You should be able to access your data, projects, anything from anywhere. Then the desktop vs. laptop is a matter of comfort/circumstance.

My toolkit for this now involved tailscale for network, nfs/smb shares for data access, and vscode/neovim for programming.

It's incredibly powerful

> when you bring it with you on travels it feels like it’s gonna fall apart internally

If I had a take a critical desktop-sized PC traveling, I'd consider building it in a rackmount 4U chassis, adding additional bracing (e.g., to keep big GPUs from wrenching on the PCIe and board, and for general chassis flex), and bolt it into a shock-reducing rackmount flight case when not at home.

But I'm trying to stick to just lugging around a vintage ThinkPad, and keeping anything larger in self-hosted servers or at cloud providers.

Or you just get a micro ATX motherboard and a case that mounts it horizontally.

That sounds like a good first-step, when the biggest concern might be relying too much on a PCIe PCB card edge connector as a structural element, as a tower case is bouncing up and down perpendicular to the vertical motherboard.

I was thinking of travel environments more hostile than that, when I might really like a road/flight case with shock absorbing. Without custom-fitting a case, rackmount is a good choice, and (with short depth) has the flexibility of looking like a presentable desktop/under-desk if you want to unrack it when not on the road.

External monitor depends on the stand. If the stand is adjustable it most likely can't be disassembled in a way that saves space. I have a normal 19 inch monitor that fits in a backpack because the stand can be disassembled into two components.

Powerful desktop + cheaper laptop to remote into it or just use. Some cloud service or server for sync. easy. Why are you trying to do something desktop is not designed for?

Have you investigated single phase dielectric liquid immersion?

Yeah, back when I was into overclocking I looked at exotic methods such as chillers, thermo electric, and liquid submersion. The latter one was interesting way of building fully passive systems due to heat diffusion + lightning effects that looks amazing... the downside is weight and having your PC in the aquarium. With chillers / thermo electric, sizing is a problem because modern overclocked CPUs require monstrous amount of power, which means hugely overbuilt and noisy chillers. Thermo electric requires a lot of power + dedicated water cooling setup... was not really worth it for me.

One benefit of tinnitus is that I appreciate white noise, so a silent PC is no longer my goal. I still want well-made fans (Noctua, Be Quiet) but the sound of air wooshing through my PC is welcome!

Big case + noctua fans is silent too. 0 pump noise. 0 mess with water cooling.

Alternatively its fun to see which fan make even comes close to noctua, if not expensive

What is this deep Micro ATX and ITX form factor? I can’t find any cases for it, they’ve made a proprietary standard we need to take a dremel to a regular case to make fit. Anyway why not Genoa? Who’s buying Intel today?

I've built machines around these "deep" form factor boards in both Fractal Node 804 and Coolermaster NR200 cases. They fit fine, no surgery required.

As to the latter question, until/unless AMD updates TR Pro, this is the only HEDT option in the DDR5/PCI-e 5.0 era. Whether that matters to you and your needs is another question entirely.

Yes but there is no mounting screw for the last screw on the 804 and you have to ditch the SSD tray on the NR200. You can’t say something is like a standard, it either is compliant or not, since everyone else designs based on assumptions from the specification

HEDT is also a make believe standard to run a pricing ladder against desktop processors for those who can’t afford workstation parts

> You can’t say something is like a standard, it either is compliant or not,

Ok, deep mATX isn't mATX compliant. It's been said. But still, it is like mATX, but longer. I tend to prefer bigger cases, but mATX boards fit in them, and deep mATX would too.

> HEDT is also a make believe standard to run a pricing ladder against desktop processors for those who can’t afford workstation parts

There are no current gen AMD workstation parts either.

What a strange hill to die on. Just don't buy the boards?

Well it’s a variant of bait and switch and the impression that they fitted the design into a standard small form factor is false. Anyone who buys this is in for a world of hurt

Having been that very person several times, I guess my anecdata is different from yours.

ASRockRack make a deep MicroATX Genoa and EATX/EEB boards too, which can take up to the 128 core Bergamo EPYC, or the high-frequency "F"-SKUs : https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=G...

Yup. I personally find those to be a waste of PCI-e lanes in the smaller form factors, but my purposes are based around I/O more than thread count. To that end, I’m on a Milan frequency-optimized SKU in my current workstation, and an ATX board with access to all of the lanes the CPU offers.

That said, with PCI-e 5.0, a little board like this has a LOT of bandwidth.

ASRock is the only company that consistently pushes the limits in smaller form factors

Their creativity in these board designs is fun to watch. They have managed to pack so much into that board area, given a little stretch outside the standards. It's a shame Mini-ATX never really caught on.

It must be an interesting culture over there to allow these sorts of designs to get to the retail market outside of their chassis, in comparison to, e.g., SuperMicro WIO designs that don't really fit anything but SM chassis.

I love them specifically for their server motherboards. Very innovative designs with a variety of chipset support and form factors. Well built, reliable, featureful, and relatively inexpensive. They're eating into Supermicro's dominance in the market.

I'm not sure that's right. Does ASRock have any product in the miniPC market? All I see are brands like Beelink and Minisforum, and they shove Ryzen5/7/9 and Core i5/i7/i9 in boxes similar to raspberry pis.

I was talking more of mini itx and micro atx form factors. E.g.:

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X...

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/k8KhP6/asrock-motherboard-x...

But they do have a smaller platform:

https://www.asrock.com/microsite/DeskMini/#About

Mini itx is over two decades old.

micro atx is even older.

Did ASRock had anything to do with any of the standards?

Meanwhile, any product being sold by the likes of Beelink and Minisforum is far smaller than any of those standard. The board alone is about a quarter of that area.

Why do you claim that ASRock pushes any form of boundaries in small form factor PCs?

If you are thinking SFF in terms of smaller than itx, then no, not really.

If you think creating a new form factor that others want to standardize means pushing boundries, then no.

Beelink and Minisforum don't sell motherboards. They sell barebone PCS with soldered on CPUs. And certainly not anything in the HEDT space. So they are in a completely different category IMO.

But utilizing the existing standards of itx/mini-atx (or nearly so), ASRock is far and away a leader in this genre. They are packing so many features into these form factors that few, if any, are able or willing to replicate.

> If you think creating a new form factor that others want to standardize means pushing boundries, then no.

I'm not sure your opinion is well founded. Take a cursory look at Amazon,and search for mini PCs. The bulk of all the offers follow one of two form factors, ASRock is nowhere to be found.

A CPU socket so dense there is a moiré pattern in the image.

I'm unhappy with the spacing between the PCIe slots, since many graphics cards are dual slot cards, which means that only the lower slot could be used without obstructing the other ones. Then there's the issue with ventilation, if, for example, you choose to use the remaining slots for 4x or 2x nvme adapter cards (4 times or 2 times 4-lane nvme cards). That huge limitation only for the smaller form factor really hurts.

This is a really cool board! But, it's bizarre that it has a VGA connector and no HDMI.

Surely VGA is simpler to implement than VGA and doesn't carry the burden of HDMI licensing requirements. It's common to see VGA and PS/2 connectors on server boards. A little bit fuzziness on the console output isn't going to stop a sysadmin from getting work done. :)

It's just that displays have been omitting vga inputs for a while now.

For a crash cart, you can pick up a vga capable display at your local thrift store for $20. The specs barely matter, it just needs to work enough to get the network management back online.

At least on the crash carts I've used, the displays were always VGA. Not sure if that's still the case. I'm not sure why.

If I was building a crash cart today (without knowing the environment) I'd have at least VGA, DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort as options. It wouldn't be too difficult to get a monitor or setup (adapters) to support them all, especially if one just needs to buy a couple for the datacenter or whatever.

Its not like you need 144Hz 4K to troubleshoot a server - its a good enough defacto standard.

I've yet to see servers with anything other than VGA. PS/2 keyboard connectors are going away (this one doesn't have one), but there'e too many crash carts built around vga to change for the moment.

That's absolutely normal for something meant to be in a rackmount server. This is not a desktop workstation board.

That's for the IPMI.

Quote:

> The platform — discovered by @momomo_us

I'm not quite sure what does "discovered" mean here in this article. Does it mean that ASRock was actively trying to hide the product and that an investigation was required?

Sweet. Space heaters keep getting smaller and more functional! ;-)

I should clarify, I'm speaking from experience, having built a 9900K system on top of an ASRock mATX board. The water cooling barely fit, and it pumps out heat like no tomorrow. Still, it's undeniably tiny and I irrationally love that build, which I can't say about my previous PC towers. So I'm probably the target market for this...

this is dope with a quadro watercooled and high performance watercooling

I am more interested in a mini pc with amd 7940hx.

This article is about MicroATX and a 56-Core Xeon

Price?

The motherboard looks to be around US$800. The processors look to be (list) around US$1k for a 16/32 and run up to US$12k for a 96/192.

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