We were immediately surprised when we began the review process for the ASRock Rack 1U10E-ROME/2T. The system is highly focused on providing a robust single-socket AMD EPYC 7002 series platform in a cost-optimized manner. Our initial idea is that this is a minimalistic server, but we realized that it has much more to offer than we expected as we began working through the system, including a small but significant undocumented feature.
ASRock Rack 1U10E-ROME/2T Hardware Overview
As this is a more complex system, we are going to look at the chassis of the system first. We will then focus our discussion on the internal design.
ASRock Rack 1U10E-ROME/2T External Overview
First off, the 1U10E-ROME/2T is significantly shorter than many servers that are competitive. It measures 24.6 inches or 625mm deep. Many of the servers we are reviewing are over 725 mm, so this was a significantly smaller package that would fit more racks.
We can see a fairly standard 1U solution by looking at the front of the system. As one would expect, there is a USB 3.0 port, basic power and reset buttons, along with status LEDs. We’re getting 10x 2.5″ bays and they offer us a few surprises.
First, SATA or NVMe are accepted by the drive bays, so one can use lower power/cost drives for boot media, then NVMe for primary storage with high performance. The speed was the second pleasant surprise. The system has an Intel DC P3700 SSD. This is a PCIe Gen3 device, so the link speed will show multiple references to 8GT/s here. Only PCIe Gen3 speeds on its U.2 drive bays are supported by many AMD EPYC 7002 systems, so this is what we expected.
Back of the System
We can see a relatively simple layout by moving to the rear of the system. Although a decidedly higher-end feature is the 10x SATA and PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD bays, this is actually a relatively cost-optimized platform. On one side and two expansion slots on the other, we have two 750W 80Plus Platinum power supplies. At the rear of the chassis, some higher-end (and more expensive) 1U AMD EPYC servers have 3 PCIe expansion slots, but here we have 1-2.
The rear I/O shows the legacy of VGA and serial ports. The rear of the system also features two USB 3.2 Gen1 ports. Just above the USB ports, we see a standard IPMI management port as well.
The other surprise feature in this scheme perhaps is networking. The onboard RJ45 networking ports may be assumed to be 1GbE, but they are 10Gbase-T ports instead. The dual 10GbE ports are powered by an Intel X550 NIC. We really like this basic networking, although this is a cost-optimized platform. It is a distinguishing factor compared to other servers in this class. If you are using SFP+ networking in a rack, adding SFP+ to 10Gbase-T adapters to switches to convert media to make this feature much more useful is now fairly inexpensive. Dual 10 Gb SFP+ ports plus a single 1GbE NIC may still be preferred, but this is also a good option.
Get your own ASRock Rack 1U10E-ROME/2T here.
