Friday, May 1st 2015
ASRock Develops Mini-ITX LGA2011v3 Motherboard with Quad-Channel Memory
They've done it! After building the first LGA2011v3 motherboard in the mini-ITX form-factor, letting you cram up to 8 "Haswell" cores into a lunchbox-sized PC, albeit having to make do with just dual-channel memory; ASRock developed the first mini-ITX motherboard with not just LGA2011v3, but also its full quad-channel memory interface, called the EPC612D4I. There's just one rider, which shouldn't really be a dealbreaker - this is a server-grade motherboard, and is bound to be expensive.
The EPC612D4I achieves its quad-channel memory chops by using smaller DDR4 SO-DIMM slots instead of standard-sized DIMM slots. Availability of aftermarket DDR4 SO-DIMM memory is close to non-existent, but that could change with 6th Generation Core processor notebooks hitting the shelves by Holiday 2015. As an enterprise board, it also supports Xeon E5-1600 V3 and E5-2600 V3 processors.
There are no CPU overclocking features, because the board's driven by an Intel C612 chipset. The lone expansion slot is a PCI-Express 3.0 x16. It even comes with a basic onboard video, driven by an ASPEED AST2400 remote management chipset, which gives display output by D-Sub, and supports resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536. This chip is wired to its own dedicated GbE connection, while two other GbE connections are given out by Intel i210 and i217LM controllers, wired to the chipset's MAC. Storage connectivity includes four SATA 6 Gb/s ports. The board comes with official support and drivers for all its onboard devices, for Windows 2012 R2/2008 R2 SP1, SuSE Server 11 SP3, RHEL 6.5, CentOS 6.5, Fedora 19, Ubuntu 12.10, and FreeBSD 9.2.
The EPC612D4I achieves its quad-channel memory chops by using smaller DDR4 SO-DIMM slots instead of standard-sized DIMM slots. Availability of aftermarket DDR4 SO-DIMM memory is close to non-existent, but that could change with 6th Generation Core processor notebooks hitting the shelves by Holiday 2015. As an enterprise board, it also supports Xeon E5-1600 V3 and E5-2600 V3 processors.
28 Comments on ASRock Develops Mini-ITX LGA2011v3 Motherboard with Quad-Channel Memory
"Tomsitpro.com reported that the EPC612D4I LGA2011-3 mini-ITX motherboard is available now for $265"
linustechtips.com/main/topic/358330-asrock-announced-another-socket-lga2011-3-itx-motherboard-a-serverboard-called-epc612d4i/
Edit: I might know why you are confused.
The 4 slots alone doesn't make it quad channel here, the 4 slots are quad channel because the CPU that fits into this motherboard can actually support 4 channels. (compared to dual channel for most mainstream CPU's)
They should have omitted the onboard video and put a couple of M.2 gen3 x4 slots.
There are a lot of credit card sized mini PCs such as RPi that have storage ports mounted on the backside of the mainboard. Even though 2011v3 platform is much more complex, mini-ITX is also larger than a credit card. So having a storage port mounted on the back is not impossible.
That being said, i'd also love to do a gaming build with this board. Who needs OC when you have 16 threads and a 980ti?
I love this board, 4 DDR4 slots (SO-DIMM) on the M-ITX form factor. I guess I am only sad this is just a server grade board, but I love the idea behind the other M-ITX board they released even though some of the main reason Haswell-E exists are not there I still find it a cool board. Really would make me want to grab a 5820K, the ITX Asrock board, 16gb of ram, and something like an R9 295X2 and make a ridiculous gaming rig (Especially if I could clock the 5820K up to 4.5ghz). Would at least be a talking piece!
Synthetic benchmarks were the only place where quad-channel showed any performance improvements.
So for me, no I would not care.
As it seems they are building more x99 mini-itx solutions so and slowly building up complexity, we can expect more coming.
You think they will go bananas and make a 4x full DIMM + 1x M.2 + 6x SATA + x99 in mini-itx format? I would gladly pay a container full of bananas to get that combo in my house.
An 8 core 16 threaded beast CPU, 32GB of pointless 3200Mhz DDR4 RAM and a GTX 980Ti or R9 390X video card packed into this case :toast:
Toasty :rockout: