GIGABYTE Server MD60-SC0 Motherboard Review: Haswell-EP with QSFP
by Ian Cutress on December 3, 2014 10:00 AM ESTGIGABYTE Server MD60-SC0 In The Box
Server motherboards are typically quite spartan, giving only a couple of SATA cables in the box to help facilitate non-standard use. Due to the orientation of the motherboard and the layout of the dedicated SATA ports, GIGABYTE Server steps a little further in this regard by providing two mini-SAS to SATA cables for the two headers on board. This allows the 8 of the 10 SATA ports provided by the chipset to be used without extra hardware needing to be purchased. Also in the box is a rear IO shield, manuals and driver disks.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 x2 (2 x 145W), - 28C/56T, 2.3 GHz (3.6 GHz Turbo) Intel Xeon E5-2650L v3 x2 (2 x 65W), - 24C/48T, 1.8 GHz (3.6 GHz Turbo) Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 x2 (2 x 160W), - 20C/40T, 2.3 GHz (3.6 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | GIGABTYE MD60-SC0 |
| Cooling | Dynatron R14 |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | ADATA XPG Z1 DDR4-2400 C16 8x8GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2133 |
| Video Cards | R7 240 |
| Video Drivers | AMD Catalyst 13.12 |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
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PCTC2 - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
Coming from the HPC space, seeing 512GB-1TB of RAM was pretty regular, but seeing 1.5TB-2TB was rare, but did occur. However, now with systems being able to have 6TB of RAM in a single 4U rack server is pretty incredible (4P servers with 96 DIMMs, Intel E7 v2 support).However, there are a few odd things about this board. For one, the QSFP+ is totally unnecessary, as it only supports 2x10GbE, and is not either 1) Infiniband or 2) 40GbE. Sure, with LACP, you could have bonded 20GbE, but you either need a splitter cable (QSFP+ to 4x SFP, with 2 SFP unusable) or a switch that supports multiple links over QSFP+ (a 40GbE with 10GbE breakout capabilities). Also, the decision to use the SFF-8087 connectors for the SATA and individual ports for SAS confounds me, as you lose the sideband support with individual cables, and onboard SATA doesn't support the sideband, thus losing some functionality with some backplanes. Also, the card Gigabyte advertises with this board is an LSI 2308, an HBA and not a full hardware RAID.
Some of Gigabyte's B2B systems have intrigued me, especially their 8x Tesla/Phi system in 2U, but this board just doesn't seem completely thought out.
jhh - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
I suspect the QSFP was designed to support a Fortville, but they didn't get them qualified in time. That would get them a true 40 Gig port, or 4x10Gfackamato - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
What's fortville?Cstefan - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Intel 40GBE QSFP+Nothing the consumer need worry over for a long time yet.
Klimax - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
With some results already available:http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6857/supermicro-a...
Cstefan - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I run multiple database servers with 2TB of ram. My next round is slated for 4TB. And absolutely no joke, they reversed the SAS and SATA connectors in a monumentally stupid move.ddriver - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
Well, surprisingly no gaming benchmarks this time, but what's with the "professional performance" benches? How many professionals out there make their money on running cinebench? How about some real workstation workloads for a change?JeffFlanagan - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
This isn't a workstation, or a gaming machine.ddriver - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
I actually applauded the absence of gaming benchmarks this time. As for whether this is for a workstation machines, I'd say it is far more suited for a workstation than suited for running winrar and image viewing software.And just to note this "review" of a "serve" motherboard doesn't have a single server benchmark whatsoever...
mpbrede - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
My usual gripe about acronyms that are not accompanied by an explanation when the term is first used. THis time aggravated by a typo, I'm sure."The system is based on the C612 chipset, which is similar to the consumer based X99 but with 2P related features, such as MTCP over PCIe."
I'm pretty sure you meant to type MCTP (Management Component Transport Protocol) and not the mTCP (microTCP?) or MTCP (Malaysian Technical Cooperation Programme or has something to do with Transport Layer Support for Highly Available Network
Services)