ASRock Rack GNRD8-2L2T Motherboard Review Intel Xeon 6 Single Socket

A few months ago, we showed you the ASRock Rack GNRD8-2L2T. Over the last few weeks, we have been using one. The ASRock Rack GNRD8-2L2T is a single-socket Intel Xeon 6 motherboard with a lot going for it. There is a lot of connectivity, onboard features, and caveats, making a review a lot of fun. Let us get to it.

The GNRD8-2L2T is a fairly large motherboard. It is a CEB (12″ x 10.5″) motherboard and that is becoming very common even for single-socket platforms. Modern server platforms have too much I/O for a standard ATX form factor.

The socket is the Intel LGA4710. Currently, this is a Sierra Forest or Intel Xeon 6700E series socket. In Q1 2025, we should see the Granite Rapids-SP or the Xeon 6700P series which we expect will also work in this platform. We already discussed the Intel Xeon 6 R1S is a Single Socket Special, and this board feels like it is designed for the extended I/O CPUs.

Flanking the socket are eight DDR5 DIMM slots. This is a 1 DIMM per channel (1 DPC) configuration even though the Xeon 6700 series is 2 DPC capable. Adding another eight DIMM slots would simply take too much space.

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