Intel’s recent release of Skylake Xeon CPUs also sparked the release of a lot of new motherboards and just a few weeks ago we saw ASRock Rack’s new workstation motherboards based on the new C236 chipset. Today, ASRock Rack introduced three new server motherboards for this platform, well suited for high-density web 2.0 and storage servers.
The first of the three new motherboards is micro-ATX sized and called the ASRock Rack E3C236D4U. It can easily fit in a rack or short depth chassis while still providing plenty of features and connectivity. The chipset provides eight SATA3 ports where one of them supports DOMs, and you get one PCIe x16, one PCIe x8, and one PCIe x1 slot along with a PCIe x4 slot that shares the bandwidth with the onboard M.2 connector. Network connectivity is covered by two Intel i210 controllers while it also features dedicated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and RTL8211E LAN. With four DIMM slots at your disposal, you can install up to 64GB DDR4 2133/1866 ECC and UDIMM memory.
ASRock Rack also introduced a lighter version of this board called the E3C232D4U-V1L (not pictured). It has basically the same features but comes with the lighter C232 chipset. That limits the SATA3 ports to six and it only features a single Intel LAN controller and no dedicated IPMI.
The second new motherboard in this series is a full ATX sized motherboard called the E3C236D4M, and it comes with 8 SATA3 ports provided by the Intel C236 chipset just like the Micro-ATX brother. It also supports up to 64GB DDR4 2133MHz dual-channel memory and it has dual Intel i210 Gigabit Ethernet controllers and onboard IPMI 2.0 with dedicated RTL8211E LAN. Expansion port wise you get two PCIe x16, two PCIe x8, and one PCIe x1 connector along with a legacy PCI one. The motherboard also features two mezzanine slots for adding up to 40Gbit extra network connectivity or SAS controllers. An M.2 connector is also present to connect those new and fast NVMe drives.
The last of the three new motherboards is called the E3C236D2I and it is an mITX sized board. The small size makes it easy to deploy as a micro server, mini servers, or tower servers no matter whether you are enterprise NAS users or just a power home users. The board supports two DDR4 ECC DIMMs with a speed up to 2133MHz and also comes with eight SATA3 ports and dual Intel LAN (i210+i219). For expansion, you get a single PCIe x16 slot which should be plenty in such small systems.
ASRock Rack didn’t reveal and pricing or availability at this time, but we can expect them to hit the online and retail shops very shortly.
