ASRock Rack B550D4-4L Motherboard Review: B550 Goes Professional with BMC
by Gavin Bonshor on May 20, 2021 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
For B550 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1909 update.
Rendering - Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite - link
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing - link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.
Compression – WinRAR 5.60b3: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
Synthetic – 7-Zip v1805: link
Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.
It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
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YB1064 - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
A professional board should have 10GbE ethernet. Period.fmyhr - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Not necessarily. For example, Supermicro builds most of its Xeon E3 boards in multiple flavors: some with multiple 1GbE, some with 10GbE. Evidently there's a market for boards without the built-in 10GbE. Of course you can always add it yourself via PCIe slot. Related: how cool would it be if boards like these had integrated OcuLink ports?beginner99 - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
I mean it's not strictly server more workstation/hobbyist focused and 10g has additional costs like the switches etc. I agree however that four 1Gbe ports are nonsensical. Really don't get that. What does oen do with 4 Ethernet ports? What is missing is a middle-ground. 2.5 and 5 gbe capable motherboards. 2x2.5gbe would be completely fine here. You can configure them as needed for fallback or teaming.I just bought a mini-itx board and ran in that issue. You get either 1gbe or 10gbe and the later with at least a $150 additional price tag. 2.5gbe? only found it in some lga1200 xeon-w boards but those don't have a bmc. bummer.
Drkrieger01 - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Four 1Gb NIC ports would be great for a edge router. Add in a 10Gb card if you need a datacenter link, should be great for small enterprise clients (150-500 users). Drop in a Ryzen GE series CPU, and you have a great low power high throughput firewall. The board layout is even great for a 2U chassis, airflow in rack chassis aren't great for traditional ram/CPU position layout.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
The exact smae argument could be made the other way around, one 10GBe port is great for any use case involving high traffic, if you want 4 ports for fallback buy a 4x1Gb card.fmyhr - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
I _think_ the reason this motherboard exists at all is that some particular LARGE customer (Facebook?) wanted it. Sure, it would be great to have variations, like Supermicro does for their Xeon E3 boards. But I guess market is not there at the moment to support this... and refusal of AMD to market Ryzen as an E3 competitor isn't helping AT ALL. In the meantime, I'm glad this board... exists? Still can't order one!BedfordTim - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
You have hit the nail on the head, but the customer is probably smaller. Most of the oddball industrial boards exist for someone's specific purpose.mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
> some particular LARGE customer (Facebook?) wanted it.Not Facebook, given they founded the Open Compute Project, 10 years ago.
Look at ASRock Rack's catalog and you'll see a lot of boards like these.
mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
Speaking of which, their B550D4M model has a OCP 2.0 Mezzanine connector A (PCIe x8).https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.a...
bananaforscale - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
Single 10G says storage server, not "high traffic" in general. Multiple 1G ports are better for security. You know you can just buy that 10G card if you need it?