The GIGABYTE MZ31-AR0 Motherboard Review: EPYC with Dual 10G

Board Features

The GIGABYTE MZ31-AR0 has an impressive array of features which stretches across the entirety of the board. Rev 1.x is designed for AMD's EPYC 7001 (Naples) family of processors, whereas Rev 2.x can use AMD's EPYC 7002 Rome CPUs. 

This motherboard doesn't use a chipset as such, it relies on the processor installed into the board. Some of the boards premium features include support for up to sixteen SATA drives, with four SlimSAS ports each enabling use for four SATA devices per cable. A solitary PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot is located next to the SlimSAS, although users looking to install more PCIe 3.0 NVMe could opt for a PCIe slot to M.2 adapter. Dominating the majority of the lower half of the board is seven PCIe 3.0 slots which operate at x8/x16/x16/x16/x8/x16. Opting for a larger E-ATX form factor has allowed GIGABYTE to include sixteen memory slots with support for DDR4-2666 LRDIMM and RDIMM up to a maximum capacity of 2 TB. 

Some of GIGABYTEs controller choices are interesting with a dual SPF+ 10 G ports on the rear powered by a Broadcom BCM 57810S Ethernet controller. A total of four USB Type-A ports are located on the rear of the board consisting of two USB 3.1 G1 and two USB 2.0 ports, while a USB 3.1 G1 and USB 2.0 front panel header offers an extra two ports per header. Also on the rear panel is a serial port, a D-sub video output provided by the Aspeed AST2500 BMC, which also includes a single Gigabit Ethernet port for remote access. As the GIGABYTE MZ31-AR0 isn't designed for the consumer market, the board has no on-board audio codec. It does, however, have a total of seven 4-pin fan headers with two dedicated for a CPU cooler, and five for chassis fans.

Test Bed

As per our testing policy, we take a high-end CPU suitable for the motherboard that was released during the socket’s initial launch, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the processor maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

For direct comparisons with consumer boards, we're using a 16-core processor.

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives, in essence, an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.

Hardware Providers
Sapphire RX 460 Nitro	MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC	Crucial MX300 + MX500 SSDs	Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs
G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX	Crucial Ballistix DDR4	Silverstone Coolers	Silverstone Fans