THEY DID IT! The AMD Ryzen SERVER you have been waiting for

This 1u Server takes AMD ryzen 7000 Series Desktop processors but it supports ECC memory and a whole bunch of other features that are more server-like than desktop-like and while it's super cool I think there are a couple things that azerk rack should never do again but but hold on let's back up for a sec hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is the ASRock rack 1u 4 LW b650 2l2t that is a mouthful of a name and while it may have an absolutely crazy name This Server represents something that is super cool in the industry it's an AMD ryzen desktop platform except it's a server platform that supports things like ECC memory and that isn't a Deployable 1u form factor we even get features like 10 gigabit Ethernet management interfaces I mean there are a whole bunch of features that are actually really good for the server market and they're they're on this system right here so at the time that we're recording this video If you were to go on the ASRock Rack website you would see that this is a preliminary product and so it's not a shipping product and since azurecrack syntha system I figured well why don't we go through the system I'm going to show you all the cool features of the server and then we're going to take a look at some of the things that are a little bit funky I also want to talk a little about the performance power consumption and then get to the key things that I've learned from server platforms like this this is not the first AMD ryzen desktop system that we've seen from Azure Arc right it's like a whole line that they have and they've been running for a couple years they actually had them with some of the the older ryzen generations and we've looked at a number of motherboards and platforms with them and I just kind of said like hey there's a there's a new ryzen 7000 series version why don't we go and take a look at that with that let's get to the hardware okay so taking a look at the front of the server let's start with that what you'll see is that we get four three and a half inch Drive Bays the sleds for these are all toolless and so you can put a three and a half inch Drive in here no problem there are also mounting holes so if you do want to screw mount a two and a half inch drive like a you know SSD or something like that you can do that as well the important thing to note is that as configured from the factory this is a SATA only configuration however I guess you might be able to go do something if you called your ASRock rack representative you want to buy a bunch of them you might be able to customize that the important thing here is that these are SATA only three and a half or two and a half inch base now in the front of the system we also have our USB and LED lights and then over here we have this kind of cool little feature that they've been doing for a little while which is that's actually an optical drive bay because in this segment they're I guess still some customers that really like to have your DVD ROMs or CD-ROM or whatever drives you can put those there and you know do do whatever with them but one of the cool things is that there is an internal two and a half inch mounting base so if you wanted to do that it's not going to be hot swappable but maybe you have a couple hard drives here and you need an extra drive just for whatever that you could actually put here and there's a mounting spot for it and there's a little bracket that you can take off that makes it a little easier so just behind the drive base what we have is our back plane you can see that we have our power and SATA connections and then behind that we have our fans now in the server there are a total of five fans and they are not the easy hot swap things that you see in like 2u servers they tend to be harder to actually do that hot swap in when you serve so a lot of servers don't have that this is one of them that doesn't now though we have five fans the chassis actually has these little blanks and there are spots for up to eight fans but we only have five installed standard and the other thing I want to point out real quick is probably one of my least favorite features of the server and that's these things now these are the airflow guides and they're that kind of mylar or whatever kind of plastic I don't know exactly what they are but they're basically a sheet that they cut and form into these just kind of airflow guides for the system some of the higher end servers instead of having these kind of flimsy units they actually have hard plastic and I prefer the hard plastic ones the reason for that is pretty simple they're just much easier to replace when there's a hard plastic one versus this kind of flimsy flimsy thing these do get the job done a lot of vendors use them I'm just not a huge fan of them okay so looking at the back of the chassis there are definitely things that are really different in the system right the first thing that you're going to notice is that we have a single power supply so this is a single 400 watt unit and on the website it says it's supposed to be an 80 plus Platinum but again this is a pre-production unit and we have an 80 plus gold there so that would be something that if you do buy these I would just double check what you're going to get now on the other side opposite the power supply we get a pcie full height by 16 so PCA Gen4 by 16 Riser this is for up to 75 Watts so you're not gonna put like a giant RTX 4090 or anything like that in there again you only have a 400 watt power supply you can put a high speed Nick in here you could put a dpu you could put any of that kind of stuff but you're not necessarily going to be putting like a giant giant GPU there are gpus that will fit in that envelope but just not all of them but I said that things are different and I mean oh yeah let's talk about this rear i o panel here for a sec so on the rear i o panel you'll see that we over here have serial and VGA ports no one comes to USB we have four USB 3 ports on the back of this so you actually get a little bit more USB connectivity than you get on the Intel based platforms that ASRock rack has that are competitive with this but on the subject of competitive platform s well as the like w8680 system that we looked at our motherboard that we looked at on the fth main site earlier they both have in common is that you actually get this HDMI because you ryzen 7000 series we get the onboard igpu there and therefore we have the ability to have display outputs that's just a little feature but you actually can go and run displays off of this thing too without having a GPU installed we then get an out-of-band Management Port because this has an a-speed AST 2600 BMC we also get uh four Network ports and this is another difference between this and this AMD version and the Intel versions the Intel versions have two one gig Intel i210 Nix as well as two 10g base T from an Intel x710 so one of their actually kind of newer Nicks this is actually using broadcom chips and that's the broadcom BCM 57416 okay so let's get to the processor in the system because that's definitely one of the big things so the socket in this system is an AMD am5 socket which means it's an LGA 1718 and it accepts the ryzen 7000 series so you can put things like a ryzen 7 for example ryzen 5. and and one thing I would just say is that there are some of the ryzen versions that tend to be pretty darn good in terms of your power for the performance that you're getting and those typically are not the highest end overclockable skus instead they tend to be they kind of like lower end or like kind of mid-range skus in the stack where you're still getting a lot of cores but you're not necessarily running them at the highest frequency so for example we first put the AMD ryzen 9 7950x in here and frankly I think that that runs a little bit too hot for a system like this if you look at the motherboard it usually says it's about 120 watt TDP CPU on air Cooling and then you get up to about 170 Watt on liquid cooling the current spec page for this says that it can take up to 270 Watts using cinebench R23 but there are a lot of workloads that are frankly a lot more demanding than cinebench because that is not a not a great Benchmark and so you know I just kind of would say I personally would put a much lower TDP than you know the higher end skus what we put in the system to do the review is an AMD ryzen 9 79 900 that is a 12 core processor I think that it retails now for like under 430 dollars so that's actually not too bad on a like dollar per core basis where you're paying you know maybe 35 bucks a core or whatever that is and then the other thing that I think is really kind of cool about this is that you know it uses only 65 It's a 65 watt TDP CPU so it fits very comfortably in the server I mean you're not running into any kind of like thermal Headroom frankly it's really hard to get a processor that has like you know eight to twelve cores and has that much clock speed if you go up to something like an AMD epic general just the genuine chips are just so much bigger than the ryzen chips these days that like you really can't hit that kind of like TDP and core count and frequency kind of combination especially at that price right so this is a much lower cost platform that I think really makes a lot of sense but the secret sauce of this motherboard is not just the fact that it has an AMD ryzen processor this also takes EC see you Dim memory so it does not take ECC rdms they are not pin compatible with ddr5 generation they were in the ddr4 generation but not in the ddr5 so you have to be very clear that you're only going to get ECC udems or regular you know just kind of consumer memory dims that fit you're not going to get server Rd dims because you just you can't interchange them anymore we have an entire video on that if you want to learn more and in that video we showed off some Micron eccu dims and that's exactly what we're using here because we purchased them for this video and we just happened to be doing that video at about the same time so we're able to show them and you might hear some folks say that like all ddr5 has ECC and in some ways it has some limited ECC like even consumer memory but it's not ECC like this supports this actually supports like real ECC memory now one of the big challenges with making a system like this is just the power consumption and also minimizing the points of failure so one of the things that ASRock rack is doing here is they're using the AMD b650 chipset now you might ask why would azerk rack not use the you know higher end chipset when those are available and the reason is that you'd probably have to have a active fan on the chipset heatsink in a one use server design so by using the b650 you don't have that limitation anymore this system also has pcie Gen 5 but the PCI Gen 5 is not the by 16 slot instead it's the m.2 slot so if you wanted to have really fast storage you I guess could do that and you could have really fast PCA Gen 5 nvme SSD that's not redundant so instead of using a really fast SSD here what we're actually just using is a very low cost one terabyte Western Digital blue SSD because they're dirt cheap and they're great boot drives for a server like this now something that a lot of sth4 members have had that I think that Azure crack should really look into is in you know this little section where you have the PCI Riser and then you have the CPU heatsink there's a kind of like pcie slot here because you have an matx motherboard and that I think would be an awesome place to be able to put another you know nvme SSD or just have like another like m.2 drive so you could have a mirrored setup so if you didn't want to have like a super fast setup at least you could do mirroring here okay so let's talk about the performance of these things real quick right so the first thing I just want to point out is that we are going to be testing this primarily with the ryzen 9 7 900 because that is within the TP specs it's a pretty low power CPU and it also gives us a really nice power consumption thing that we're going to talk about in a little bit so with that what we wanted to do was test this versus our platform that we used for our initial AMD ryzen 7000 series which is a falcon Northwest system and we want to just kind of test like you know the difference in performance between that ryzen 7000 series platform which is more of a consumer overclocking Type Thing versus this one which is a you know like the you can see the vrms are just you don't have like wild heatsinks and stuff like that and what we saw was that in general we were pretty darn close to what we got on that you know kind of fancy gaming platform except you know we're just we just have this in a 1u chassis and the performance because of that does suffer I guess a slight bit but it's not necessarily something that would make me go find another solution because this is kind of a class leading solution right foreign about the power consumption side of this so one of the really cool things about having the 65 watt TDP CPU is that in general unless you're doing like crazy AVX things or like you know really pushing all 12 cores you're gonna stay in that 120 watt range and kind of like your maximum as well you know if you have all hard drives you have accelerators all kinds of you can go way beyond that and you know you have that 400 watt power supply there for a reason but on the flip side if you have a pretty minimal configuration you can definitely have a server like this that runs at under 120 watts and the reason that's so important is that there are a whole bunch of co-location facilities that have just historically been and still are 1u and they'll give you like a one amp 110 or 120 volt power supply and you have to kind of stay within those power limits right and so that's something where I think that this server really sets itself apart because you're not gonna have a Milan server that is running you know that kind of power maximum where you don't really have to worry about it this if you're running some of the higher end to AMD ryzen you know nine chips or something like that you're probably gonna run into over 120 watts at some point with this configuration I think we did get it to Peak just over 120 watts when we were running kind of like everything at full bore and all that kind of stuff but the vast majority of workloads I mean and I'm not talking about like vast majority like 55 or something like that I'm talking about like probably like 99 of the workloads are more out there will never hit 120 watts in a configuration like this so there's a lot of folks out there that still want a lot of performance so maybe like the old Xeon E Series is just not fast enough for E3 series just not nowhere near fast enough anymore and so you want more performance this actually gives you that additional performance but in a power envelope that was more similar to what we saw with the Xeon you know E3 and E you know 2122 2300 Series so this is really cool foreign videos I really like to have key Lessons Learned and I think for this one I have the three key Lessons Learned the first one is that this is what's called a cost optimized platform I don't exactly know what this is going to retail but I think early indications are somewhere in that like twelve hundred dollar range for the bare bone system so by the time you add memory you add CPUs you add maybe an SSD or something like that you're probably going to end up spending somewhere I don't know maybe like 17 1800 on the server some people may say well I can get a used server for much less than that and you probably can but you can't get this much performance in a used server and get it in that like sub 120 watt just kind of threshold for that type of co-location right so like you can spend more on operating costs and spend less on the hardware up front but this thing is so fast that it just kind of runs circles around old server Hardware my second key lesson learned is more like a comment I do not like these little flimsy things I understand why they have them in this platform because you know they're less expensive and easier to make and even if you're doing low volumes and stuff like that they are kind of easier to work with on the other hand I'm just not a huge fan of them I prefer the just kind of nice little hard plastic ones they're just easier to get situated and stay in place in the system for the third one though let's talk really quickly about the product name now this is the 1u 4lw b650 and then there's a slash and then it's 2l2t that slash I just dislike in product names just if you're ever a product manager and you're thinking what should I name my product please do not use slashes one of the big reasons for that is that it makes it extremely hard to be able to print a product name gonna go have a Windows File you can't have a slash in the file name you also if you're gonna put it on web that slash would indicate that you have a new directory so it just doesn't work to put product names with slashes please stick with the dash but yeah maybe that's just to say that I absolutely love these little ryzen server platforms we did a bunch of the previous generations so the ryzen like three thousand five thousand series platforms those were great and we actually have one of our writers will who has been deploying these for his clients in his managed Services business and he loves these things hey guys I hope you liked this look at an awesome ASRock wreck when you ryzen server if you did like this video why don't you give it a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 113,167

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, amd, intel, intel xeon, ubuntu, amd epyc, virtualization, amd ryzen, homelab, 10gbe, proxmox, proxmox ve, amd ryzen 9 7900, amd ryzen server, ryzen server, amd server, asrock server, asrock rack server, amd 7000 series, amd vs intel, ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T, 1U4LW-B650/2L2T

Id: q61vJJ48rkI

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Kougar]

Patrick takes a look at the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T. Written version: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-server-the-asrock-rack-1u4lw-b650-2l2t-review/

This wacky thing is desktop AM5 with a B650 chipset in a 1U rack with server features, including full ECC. Pretty much proof that if board vendors wanted to put ECC on desktop boards they could have done so.

[u/AstroZombie1]

Asrock Rack do great server boards their CS afterwards is great too I have an AM4 rack board as the basis for my truenas box.

[u/Sopel97]

not putting a 7950x in this is just a waste, that PSU needs to be better for this thing to make sense imo