This motherboard is STUPID.. and I love it!!

now it's pretty common for a product to come into our studio that is so spectacularly pointless that we can't imagine why anyone would buy it but what's far less common is for one of those seemingly pointless products to be such an incredible piece of engineering that I simply cannot help but make a video about it well that's what happened today this is the ass rock rack EPC 6 - 1 d 4 I - 2 m a mini ITX motherboard with a CPU socket that's almost the size of the board that's right my friends I today I'm going to be using this motherboard to build a 28 core computer in a small form-factor chassis with the gaming graphics card because at this point it just can't get much dumber can it speaking of dumb you'd be dumb if you don't check out our sponsor for today's video honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on popular shopping websites like Amazon eBay and more get it today at join honeycomb slash LTTE did I mention it's free [Music] okay before we go any further I feel like I owe you guys an explanation for what makes this dumb because there's nothing inherently dumb about a motherboard it's as good as the components that you can plug into it and this one well he can plug some pretty amazing components into it it's got four memory slots here so these support sodium memory as well as ECC memory if you're into that maximum stability it's got an LGA 36:47 socket with support for up to an 81 80 Platinum 28 core Xeon processor it's got a PCI Express 16 X slot here it's got one of those handy-dandy powered SATA ports for those little tiny drives as well as a breakout - for additional SATA ports right here and finally it's got a pair of MDOT two nvme SSD slots on the back which on a different version of the sport you can actually see the connector pads here can actually be equipped with memory instead of nvme SSD modules but it's not any of the stuff that we can connect to it that makes it dumb it's more the fact that it ends up being kind of a solution looking for a problem so if we're after an ITX board presumably we're trying to build something compact so if we wanted like not a crazy core count but let's say 10 cores or 12 or 18 we could go with Intel's LGA 2066 socket which has both core I 9 processors and even their xeon w's with support for ECC memory if we're after that stability it's a much smaller socket and has all the features that we could possibly use on a board of this form factor then let's say that we did want some kind of you know madness 28 core system or something like that well the thing is that in the server space there are far better solutions that allow you to build a more compact overall system even if the motherboards are in some cases a little bit bigger so typically what you would do is you would use what's called blade servers where you have like this larger rack that has multiple modules each of which might have a couple CPU sockets like this this kind of inline airflow cooling solution with the power supply at the back and everything tightly integrated if you're using a standard Mini ITX motherboard with like your standard ATX power connectors you're probably using a commodity off-the-shelf server case in which case you're going to end up with kind of a big server considering how small your motherboard is the final thing that makes it kind of dumb is that some of the key capabilities of this processor including its 48 PCI Express Lanes and its support for up to 6 channel memory are physically not capable of being utilized here because the board is physically too small to put a whole bunch of PCI Express expansion on and even six memory slots to fully take advantage of that I mean not to mention that the space constraints also give us a total of five ports VGA output two Gigabit Ethernet one of which is shared with the management interface and 2 USB 3 ports that's it naturally I don't give a hoot about any of that though and my goal is to use this thing to build the bang inist small form-factor quiet workstation gaming I don't know what it is but it's a super powerful system and it starts with getting our cooler installed so this is one of naktu us Nhu 12s coolers with a pretty spectacular mounting mechanism on it so this is designed specifically for the LGA 3647 socket and this should be we hope enough to tame our 28 core beast this is actually the CPU that I dropped so what I'm kind of hoping is that the dead memory channel on it is one of the ones we're not using and then maybe it has a permanent home maybe Azeroth built this board just for me now we put on some thermal interface material and the usual rules about a grain of rice yeah those gets thrown out the window with these guys you want a lot of thermal goop on here that may not even be enough it is a big chip we can actually do a quick sanity check here once it's on a little bit the CPU is so stuck to the bottom of the heatsink that I cannot get it off without applying a little bit more force than I'm happy to apply right now so we're gonna assume there's enough thermal goop on it like that the cooler is bigger than the motherboard now it's time to load the rest of this thing up so we're going with four of the 16 gig ECC ddr4 2133 modules these aren't the fastest thing around but they were all that was sitting in the warehouse and man I gotta say there is something to be said for working with miniature sized hardware because like handling this thing is super easy let's throw some some drives on the bottom or whatever like flippity floppity there they go pretty much no hassle at all so now that our engine so to speak is complete let's have a look at what we're using for the chassis this is the LDO 3 from silverstone and this is one of those cases where they asked us if we wanted to review it and we said no we don't really review cases anymore but wow that looks really cool I'm sure I can find something to do with it at some point so it's got these these smoked glass tempered glass panels here it's got a really unique form factor should be great for cooling especially with that heatsink that we've got on there and it gives us a real good look at our graphics card once we get that installed let's go ahead and strip it down here what should even be pretty easy to build in now one compromise is apparent already while the case has support for USB 3 on the front panel the motherboard does not in fact I don't even know if it has front USB 2 what the jazz no it has a couple of things that look like USB too like this one which is a comport it's a serial port and this one which is the front panel connectors for power and reset and all that stuff that's fairly disappointing all right so I'm going to do the power supply first this is another piece of silverstone small form-factor fun this is their SF XL 800 watt power supply so we're not going to be power supply limited no matter what kind of CPU and graphics card we throw in here so it's screwed in now but you guys can see this is one of those cases where the power supply is actually mounted on the inside of the case with no direct external access so we've got to make sure that we've actually got it switched on and then we run this extender here up to here you go up at the top of the case and that's what we're actually going to plug it into the wall all right so our next challenge is our front panel connectors now powering reset and all that stuff we're gonna have to check them and you'll find out how that goes in but these ones are really interesting so not only do we not have front USB three we don't even have front audio on this thing so we're gonna be relying on our graphics cards built-in audio if we want to get any sound output from this system whatsoever I mean alternately we could use a USB sound card but you must be poor it's a kind of short supply - okay this is hilarious guys I was looking up the pin out for the front panel connectors and I found out there is in fact a USB 2 header on this thing unfortunately I didn't recognize it and I can't use it because it's a miniature one so here's a normal USB front panel plug and that's the size of the header so [Music] that that doesn't I don't know I've never seen this before it's like mini-usb too so this is kind of a magic moment where we install our motherboard [Music] well there's only one way to find out so this panel comes off ooh hey well played Silverstone okay so I'm in there getting the motherboard screws and like it's kind of amateur highbrow channel but okay this isn't the case mounting hardware does this remind you of anything really Silverstone crow uh okay well this isn't perfect but it's also not nearly as bad as it looks right now so you've got enough room for our vrm heat seem to breathe in there and most of that cable mass is gonna be covered by our secret ingredient our-our TX 28 ET i complete with hydro dippin the cooler power connectors in not bad okay wow that actually went a lot faster than I could have possibly hoped so we are pretty much ready to see if this monster boots up that's it super compact air-cooled and theoretically super quiet too well I've got an update for ya try as I might I can't get two of these memory channels to recognize which is new before it was one so CPUs got to come out and are known good platinum 8180 is going in glued together CPU is out known good CPU is in let's find out if it's the board or the processor the fact that there were two dead channels makes me think that there might be something wrong with the board hey not bad so there it is 64 gigs around okay now another thing I couldn't figure out was how on earth to configure my nvme drives in raid I set everything in here that I could possibly find to raid the manual says you just press ctrl I when you're booting and you can configure raid but that doesn't come up so nothing in here about a raid option ROM something something so I'm just kind of that a bit of a loss we're gonna settle for just one in DME drive I guess alright ladies and gentlemen we are super close now I went and got a USB hub so this is a super elegant solution to not having any USB ports hey it's working the one thing I'm having trouble with though is the fan speed this is supposed to be a quiet build but check this out guys it's one of the fans on the graphics card now I've got my drivers installed but even then like that shouldn't be doing that so now I'm installing afterburner and I'm just gonna see if maybe it's something that I can fix by adjusting the fan speed manually or something the tachometer is at 4700 rpm you can see the dip where I put my finger on it so right now there's two possibilities really one is that this PCI Express slot was not really designed to have a graphics card in it and therefore never really tested with a graphics card in it and is bugged in some way that is interfering with the GPUs ability to regulate its fan speed that's a possibility possibility number two is that this was the hydro dipped one maybe we didn't put it together quite right there is a little PCB in here that I think has something to do with fan control that maybe wasn't hooked up correctly so I got my hands on another r-tx 20 atti and we're gonna try this one and hopefully this works oh boy looks like this needs some fixing so it's probably something to do with this now that it's more like what we were expecting so all 64 gigs of memory are detected here CPU lol 28 course 56 threats let's fire up some cinnamon shall we now first let's grab a reference score so we know what we're expecting score over 90 300 all right that's what we're expecting wish us luck what are we turning to right now oh three key cards wait 40 158 that's it ah she was running two of them so actually that's exactly right huh so in spite of the fact that we're running an ITX motherboard we were still able to pull off about what we'd expect on Cinebench now the next thing we want to see is if we can maintain those kinds of turbo speeds even under a sustained load so this is blender classroom and what I want to see is if after a couple of minutes it starts to throttle down we're sitting at around 55 to 60 degrees across all of our cores here not too shabby considering that we've got it pegged at a hundred percent usage and we're just shy of three gigahertz on twenty eight cores now people might ask what anyone could possibly need 28 cores for and that's a fair question but check this out this system with the CPU pegged at a hundred percent is still responsive enough that you can be just like using your computer and opening other applications and it it just works it just works fine that's gonna affect our benchmark score but remember guys that's not what we're after I just wanted to see if the turbo was gonna drop damn it okay well you guys missed it but we finished the entire test and actually did not turbo down at all so that's pretty darn impressive actually I wasn't really expecting that I mean this board it does have the Xeon Platinum 8180 28 core on its supported list but I didn't think ass Rock even thought anyone was actually gonna put it on there alright so now we've got some enno 1,800 going and what I get a kick out of here is that the game at peak bear was using about seven percent of the CPU running really smoothly considering the detail level that I'm running out here looking pretty darn good alright here we go quick alt-tab 7.4% whoa that's what happens when you got 56 threads right couldn't leave so many of them in a game so now I want to see if our system stays quiet when we stress the GPU it's running real smooth we're getting about 120 hundred and 30 frames per second and doom feels good yeah that's a super smooth I could get used to playing on a 10,000 dollar processing the glass actually helps to mask a lot of the noise that would otherwise come out toward the user and most of the ventilation is actually down here up from the bottom and then out the top so when you're sitting where you normally would be it's really impressive considering there's you know real-time ray-tracing power in there and twenty-eight CPU cores so just checking in this is about a worst case scenario for our graphics card we're sitting at around 95 percent usage 84 degrees which is where it'll start to throttle down and it's hovering right around the 60 and 20 yeah about 1620 megahertz not too bad at all for an RT X xx atti founders Edition not being held back by the case at that point oh that's funny you know how I was saying that was like super responsive Brendan I accidentally had an O open in the background sucking up 2% of the CPU so that's it guys this may not be the most conventional system that I've ever built and this motherboard may be super stupid but is that ever a lot of performance in a very very small space and still running reasonably quietly so shout out to asrock for building a pretty freakin cool board and I hope you guys enjoyed our little adventure building with it the mast drawbacks cost porta pro x headphones are based on the original 1984 costs on ear portable design but updated to make them more modern and durable they can be folded up in different configurations for easy storage they use oxygen free copper voice coils that provide a wide frequency response and they feature warm and smooth audio a single button control lets you skip tracks make calls and activate voice commands and they've got a lifetime warranty from costs along with a noise cancelling mic so join the drop today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video hit that button but if you liked it like it subscribe to me consider checking out where to buy the stuff you featured to the link in video description also down there is our merch store which has closer it's like this one oh and more importantly this one this one's really cool and more importantly than that underwear now I won't show you the underwear 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,738,273

Rating: 4.9105453 out of 5

Keywords: asrock, epc621d4I-2m, motherboard, server, unboxing, overview, xeon, 28-core, cpu

Id: nF3w-xnkRwE

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/spendavis]

Came here to post this but you got there first; fun video!

[u/The_Sly_Sloth]

So when is the Asrock TR4 platform coming out? mITX Threadripper anybody? :D

[u/rcradiator]

I was hoping Linus would bring out the Ncase and make the most overkill sffpc. A bit of a shame really, but then again I'm not sure a U9S could even tame that Platinum 8180 at all.

[u/Milestailsprowe]

So Silverstones New Vertical case and Noctua's All black cooler are shown in this video.

[u/Kolomanschell]

Actually I think you could build some cool SFF kickass home server out of it.

The board is not as stupid as Linux is making it.

If he picked reasonable components and thought less 'Gaming' it could be quite interesting build.

[u/ruslantulupov]

C621?

28 Core Hackintosh, anyone?

[u/squidletdos]

Hey, don’t talk to Linus like that!

[u/ccricers]

It's not in black tho.. which means it's time for a Linus expensive spray paint job