now it's pretty common for a product to come into our studio that is so
spectacularly pointless that we can't imagine why anyone would buy it but
what's far less common is for one of
those seemingly pointless products to be
such an incredible piece of engineering
that I simply cannot help but make a
video about it well that's what happened today this is the ASRock rack EPC 621 D4
i-2 m a mini ITX motherboard with a CPU
socket that's almost the size of the board that's right my friends I today am
going to be using this motherboard to build a
28 core computer in a small form factor
chassis with a gaming graphics card
because at this point it just can't get much Dumber can it
okay before we go any further I feel like I owe you guys an explanation for
what makes this dumb because there's nothing inherently dumb about a
motherboard it's as good as the components that you can plug into it and
this one well you can plug some pretty amazing components into it it's got four
memory slots here so these support sodm memory as well as ECC memory if you're
into that maximum stability it's got an LGA 3647 socket with support for up to
an 8180 Platinum 28 cor zon processor
it's got a PCI Express 16x slot here it's got one of those handy dandy
powered SATA ports for those little tiny drives as well as a breakout to four
additional SATA ports right here and finally it's got a pair of m.2 NVMe SSD
slots on the back which on a different version of this board you can actually
see the connector pads here can actually be equipped with memory
instead of NVMe SSD modules but it's not
any of the stuff that we can connect to it that makes it dumb it's more the fact
that it ends up being kind of a solution looking for a problem so if we're after
an ITX board presumably we're trying to build something compact so if we wanted
like not a crazy core count but let's say 10 cores or 12 or or 18 we could go
with Intel's LGA 2066 socket which has both core I 9 processors and even there
zon WS with support for ECC memory if we're after that stability it's a much
smaller socket and has all the features that we could possibly use on a board of
this form factor then let's say that we
did want some kind of you know Madness
28 core system or something like that
well the thing is that in the server space there are far better solutions
that allow you to build a more compact overall system even if if the
motherboards are in some cases a little bit bigger so typically what you would
do is you would use what's called blade servers where you have like this larger
rack that has multiple modules Each of which might have a couple CPU sockets
like this with this kind of inline airflow cooling solution with the power
supply at the back and everything tightly integrated if you're using a
standard miniitx motherboard with like your standard ATX power connectors
you're probably using a commodity off-the-shelf server C in which case
you're going to end up with kind of a big server considering how small your motherboard is the final thing that
makes it kind of dumb is that some of the key capabilities of this processor
including its 48 PCI Express Lanes and
its support for up to six Channel memory are physically not capable of being
utilized here because the board is physically too small to put a whole
bunch of PCI Express expansion on and even six memory slots to fully take
advantage of that I mean not to mention that the space constraints also give us
a total of five ports VGA output 2 GB
Ethernet one of which is shared with the management interface and two usb3 ports
that's it naturally I don't give a hoot about any of that though and my goal is
to use this thing to build the bang inist small form factor quiet
workstation gaming I don't know what it is but it's a super powerful system and
it starts with getting our cooler installed so this is one of noa's nhu12s
coolers with a pretty spectacular
mounting mechanism on it so this is designed specifically for the LGA
3647 socket and this should be we hope
enough to tame our 28 core Beast this is
actually the CPU that I dropped so what I'm kind of hoping is that um the dead
memory channel on it is one of the ones we're not using and then maybe it has a
permanent home maybe azck built this board just for me now we put on some
thermal interface material and the usual rules about a grain of rice yeah those
get thrown out the window with these guys you want a lot of thermal goop on
here that may not even be enough it is a big chip we can actually do a quick
sanity check here once it's on a little
bit the CPU is so stuck to the bottom of the heyn that I cannot get it off
without applying a little bit more Force than I'm happy to apply right now so
we're going to assume there's enough thermal goop on it
look at that the cooler is bigger than the
motherboard now it's time to load the rest of this thing up so we're going
with four of these 16 gig ECC ddr4 2133
modules these aren't the fastest thing around but uh they were all that was
sitting in the warehouse and
um man I got to say there is something to be said for working with miniature
sized Hardware cuz like handling this
thing is super easy want to throw some some drives on the bottom or whatever
like swiy swaity there they go pretty
much no hassle at all so now that our
engine so to speak is complete let's
have a look at what we're using for the chassis this is the
ld3 from Silverstone and this is one of
those cases where they asked us if we wanted to review it and we said no we
don't really review cases anymore but wow that looks really cool uh I'm sure I
can find something to do with it at some point so it's got these um these smoked
glass tempered glass panels here it's got a really unique form factor should
be great for cooling especially with that heat sink that we've got on there
and it gives us a real good look at our graphics card once we get that installed
let's go ahead and strip it down here whoop
should even be pretty easy to build in now one compromise is apparent
already while the case has support for
USB 3 on the front panel uh the
motherboard does not in fact I don't
even know if it has front USB
2 what the Jazz nope it has a couple things that
look like USB 2 like this one
which is a Comm Port it's a Serial port and this one which is the front panel
connectors for uh Power and reset and all that
stuff that's fairly disappointing all right so I'm going to
do the power supply first this is another piece of Silverstone small form
factor fun this is their
sfxlg to be power supply limited no matter what kind of CPU and graphics
card we throw in here so it's screwed in now but you guys can see this is one of
those cases where the power supply is actually mounted on the inside of the
case with no direct external access so we got to make sure that we've actually
got it switched on and then we run this uh extender here up to here you go up at
the top of the case and that's where we're actually going to plug it into the wall all right so our next challenge is
our front panel connectors Now power and reset and all that stuff we're going to
have to check the manual find out how that goes in uh but these ones are
really interesting so not not only do we not have front USB
3 we don't even have front audio on this thing so we're going to be relying on
our graphics cards built-in audio if we want to get any sound output from this
system whatsoever I mean alternately we could use a USB sound card but uh USB
ports are kind of in short supply too okay this is hilarious guys I was
looking up the pin out for the front panel connectors and I found out there
is in fact a USB 2 header on this thing
unfortunately I didn't recognize it and I can't use it
because it's a miniature one so here's a normal USB front panel plug and that's
the size of the header
so that that doesn't I don't know I've
never seen this before it's like mini USB 2 so this is kind of a magic moment
where we install our motherboard
this case is too small
um well there's only one way to find out
so this panel comes off ooh
hey well played silver
Stone okay so I'm in there getting the motherboard screws and like this is kind
of a mature highbrow Channel
but okay this is in the case mounting hardware does this remind you of
anything really Silverstone grow up okay well this isn't perfect but it's
also not nearly as bad as it looks right
now see we've got enough room for our vrm heat sink to breathe in there and
most of that cable mess is going to be
covered by our secret ingredient our RTX
280 ETI complete with uh hydro dipping
cooler power connectors in
not bad okay wow that actually went a lot
faster than I could have possibly hoped so we are pretty much ready to see if
this monster boots
up that's it super compact air cooled
and theoretically super quiet
too well I've got enough update for you
try as I might I can't get two of these
memory channels to recognize which is new before it was
one so CPU's got to come out and our
known good Platinum 8180 is going in
glued together CPU is out known good CPU
is in let's find out if it's the board or the processor the fact that there
were two dead channels makes me think
that there might be something wrong with the board
hey not bad so there it is 64 gigs of
RAM okay now another thing I couldn't figure out was how on Earth to configure
my NVMe drives in raid I set everything in here that I could possibly find to
raid the manual says you just press control I when you're booting and you
can configure raid but that doesn't come up
so nothing in here
about any raid option ROM something
something so I'm just kind of at a bit of a loss we're going to settle for just
one mbme drive I guess all right ladies
and gentlemen we are super close now I went and got a USB hub so this is
a super elegant solution to not having
any USB ports but hey it's working the
one thing I'm having trouble with though is the fan speed this is supposed to be
a quiet build but check this out
guys it's one of the fans on the graphics card now I've got my drivers
installed but even then like that shouldn't be doing that um so now I'm
installing After Burner and I'm just going to see if maybe it's something that I can fix by adjusting the fan
speed manually or something what the crap see the
tachometer is at 4700 RP M you can see
the dip where I put my finger on
it so right now there's two possibilities really one is that this
PCI Express lot was not really designed
to have a graphics card in it and therefore never really tested with a graphics card in it and is bugged in
some way that is interfering with the
GPU's ability to regulate its fan speed
that's a possibility possibility number two is that this was the hydro dipped
one maybe we didn't put it together quite right there is uh a little PCB in
here that I think has something to do with fan control that maybe wasn't
hooked up correctly
so I got my hands on another RTX 2080 TI
and we're going to try this one and
hopefully this works oh boy
looks like this needs some
fixing so it's probably something to do with
this now that is more like what we were
expecting so all 64 gigs of memory are
detected here CPU
LOL 28 cores 56 threads let's fire up
some cinon shall we now first let's grab a reference score so we know what we're
expecting score over 9,300 all
right that's what we're expecting wish us luck what are we
turboing to right now ooh 3
gz wait 4158 that's it ah he was running
two of them so actually that's exactly
right huh so in spite of the fact that we're running an ITX motherboard we were
still able to pull off about what we'd expect effect on cinebench now the next
thing we want to see is if we can maintain those kinds of Turbo speeds
even under a sustained load so this is blender classroom and what I want to see
is if after a couple of minutes it starts to Throttle Down we're sitting at
around 55 to 60° across all of our cores
here not too shabby considering that we've got it pegged at 100% usage and
we're just shy of 3 GHz on 28
cores now people might ask what anyone could possibly need 28 cores for and
that's a fair question but check this out this system with the CPU pegged at
100% is still responsive enough that you can be just like using your computer and
opening other applications and it it just works it just works fine that's
going to affect our Benchmark score but remember guys that's not what we're after I just wanted to see if the turbo
was going to drop damn it okay well you
guys missed it but we finished the entire test and actually did not turbo
down at all so that's pretty darn
impressive actually I I wasn't really expecting that I mean this board uh it
does have the Zeon Platinum 81 8028 core
on its supported list but I I I don't
know I just I didn't think ASRock even thought anyone was actually going to put
it on there all right so now we've got some n 1800 going and what
I get a kick out of here is that the game at Peak there was using about 7% of
the CPU it's running really smoothly considering the detail level that I'm
running at here looking pretty darn good all right
here we go quick alt tab 7.4%
woo that's what happens when you got uh 56 threads right you can only use so
many of them in a game so now I want to see if our system stays
quiet when we stress the
GPU it's running real smooth we're getting about 120 130 frames per second
in Doom feels good yeah this is super
smooth I could get used to playing on a $10,000
processor the glass actually helps to mask a lot of the noise that would
otherwise come out toward the user and most of the ventilation is actually down
here up from the bottom and then out the top so when you're sitting where you
normally would be it's really impressive
considering there's you know realtime Ray tracing power in there and 28 CP U
course so just checking in this is about a worst case scenario for our graphics
card we're sitting at around 95% usage 84° which is where it'll start to
Throttle Down and it's hovering right around the
1620 yeah about 1620 mahz not too bad at
all for an RTX 2080 TI Founders Edition
not being held back by the case at that point oh that's funny you know how I was
saying was like super responsive Brandon I accidentally had ano open in the
background sucking up 2% of the CPU so
that's it guys this may not be the most conventional system that I've ever built
and this motherboard may be super stupid but man is that ever a lot of
performance in a very very small space
and still running reasonably quietly so
shout out to ASRock for building a pretty freaking cool board and I hope
you guys enjoyed our little Adventure building with it the Mast drop X Porta
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